Taxpayers suffer as eTIN service disrupted again

The disruption in the National Board of Revenue's (NBR) electronic tax identification number (eTIN) services due to back-to-back technical glitches at one week's interval has landed taxpayers in trouble.

Submission of tax returns and online payment also remained halted because of a glitch in the server.

After a round of failure, the eTIN server was repaired on Wednesday (15 March). The system further failed from Sunday (19 March) and it remained unrepaired till Monday evening, said sources from the NBR.

The eTIN registration webpage was found unresponsive after several attempts were made to visit the page via incometax.gov.bd as of 6:30pm on Monday.

"It will not be possible to get TINs, submit e-returns or make e-payments. In addition, no files will be saved for the previous six hours before the problem occurs. However, files stored on the server will not be affected," a former senior official of the concerned department of the NBR told The Business Standard.

Another tax expert told TBS that now the disruption won't affect too much as it's not the peak time to submit returns. But it will hurt those who are in urgent need for TIN.

Sources from the NBR told TBS that the authority held a meeting yesterday to find a way out of the issue.

Contacted, NBR Chairman Abu Hena Md Rahmatul Muneem and two other higher officials could not be reached over the phone.

More than 80 lakh people are registered under the eTIN system, of which over 30 lakh TIN holders so far submitted their income tax return last tax year. No one can now register income tax manually as NBR made eTIN mandatory.

Sources said that NBR runs the system through a software service provider company named Synesis IT Ltd.

"NBR has no agreement with the software service provider company and also, for the last two years, NBR didn't pay any service charge to the company. So, we couldn't get proper service from that company," an NBR official, on condition of anonymity, recently told TBS.

He said that the tax department sent a file to the internal resources division of the finance ministry for approval of payment and agreement, but didn't get any response.

Abdul Bari, deputy chief operating officer of Synesis IT Ltd, said that there was not any mistake on their side but they suspected the problem may have originated from hardware.