Inspection of businesses by various officers of the Tax Department
In an open letter to Treasury Secretary Dr. P.B. Jayasundara, a group of taxpayers, who wish to remain anonymous, have complained about too many inspections by tax officers. The letter says:
“We as businessmen do our business with a lot of difficulties and manage the work very carefully. However in recent times, we are being inspected by the officers of various branches of Department of Inland Revenue and that has become a never-ending process to prepare schedules and submit documents to them.
There are repetitions of requests to pay additional taxes by all these branches for the same tax and same period. These units come to our organizations repeatedly.
We are checked by the Respective Unit where our file belongs. Then we are checked by the Special Audit Branch and this is followed by checking by the Inspection Team. It doesn’t end there; Officers of the Investigation Branch visit our offices followed by the Vat Audit Branch officers.
Why are all these units harassing taxpayers?
We have no time to do business as we have to submit details over and over again for the same periods to various tax branches.
Why, are they doing this to us? Is Inland Revenue trying to cover up their own incapabilities by harassing taxpayers or trying to make something by doing this?
Please Sir, advice the department not to harass people and not to repeat the same work by sending five groups to do the same work for same accounting periods.
The best method adopted by other countries is to implement direct taxes and not indirect taxes.
When you try to collect indirect taxes it leads to corruption and incur more costs of administration to the department.
Taxpayers are forced to keep silent without complaining due to possible repercussions if a complaint is made.