An Overview of Tax Reforms in Bangladesh: Corporate Perspective

Abstract

Tax reform is an issue of endless political debate in all developed and developing countries. The discussion on tax reform revolves around the issues relating to designing an appropriate tax base, strengthening tax administrations, and ensuring efficiency, equity, and progressive taxation. In Bangladesh, a lot of reform initiatives have taken in the last four decades. This study is an attempt to review those initiatives by highlighting corporate matters as there is hardly any research work on those issues in the context of Bangladesh. Content and document analysis and interview methods are used to carry out this study. The study finds that the outcome of those reforms is mixed and in some cases, noteworthy achievements are evident, as for examples, the establishment of Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) and Central Intelligence Cell (CIC) and digitalization of the tax process, while remarkable weaknesses are still prevailing in enforcement, audit, and compliance. Revenue implication of tax reforms displays that the trend in the direct tax collection is increasing moderately, and the overall tax-GDP ratio is showing very slow progress. We recommend a new all-inclusive reform effort covering all the upcoming challenges in the field of corporate taxation as no comprehensive reform effort has been undertaken for nearly a decade.