65pc of selected shops yet to install ECR, POS in six years

The National Board of Revenue has made very little success in persuading the shopkeepers from 11 categories to install electronic cash registers or point of sales at their shops in half a decade of the introduction of the system.
More than 65 per cent of the shops selected for using the ECR or POS have not yet installed the technology, according to the NBR data.
Since July 2009, only around 35 per cent of the selected shops across the country installed ECR or POS to register sales record for ensuring proper calculation of value-added tax, according to the latest data of the revenue board.
Till May 2015, only 2,970 out of the 8,559 selected shops installed ECR or POS software.
There is, however, no data on how many of them are using the technology as there are widespread allegations that many of the businesses just showcase the machines at their shops. The machines either remain out of work or the shopkeepers refrain from using those.
The field-level VAT offices of the revenue board identified 11,005 shops eligible for using the technology and of which 8,559 shops were selected for installation of ECR machines or POS software.
If 38,000 VAT paying units from the sectors are considered, the progress is very meagre.
The NBR in 2009 made the installation of ECR or POS mandatory for hotels, restaurants, sweetmeat shops, fast food outlets, beauty parlours, furniture shops, community centres, departmental and general stores, jewellery, all shops at shopping malls in the metropolitan areas and, medium and large wholesale and retail shops across the country.
NBR chairman Md Nojibur Rahman on July 9 told reporters that they found that many of the shopkeepers had made the system ineffective through manipulation to dodge VAT.
The VAT intelligence office of the NBR is now working to detect the offenders, he said.
The technology was introduced to prevent evasion of VAT collected from the consumers by the shopkeepers as the manual system of accounting used at outlets leaves room for tax evasion.
Businesses are supposed to deposit the VAT collected from the consumers while selling products and services to the government exchequer and provide VAT challan to the consumers.
There are widespread allegations that shopkeepers gobble up a large portion of the collected VAT hiding those in the manual accounting registers and not providing VAT challan to the consumers.
According to the data updated up to May 2015, more than 1.50 lakh shops under the 11 categories are registered with the VAT wing of the NBR across the country.
The field offices were supposed to identify the other eligible shops for using ECR and POS to bring them under the system to increase revenue collection from the sectors but the list of the identified or selected shops was not updated further.
According to the NBR data, there are 2,000 VAT paying hotels, 4,250 restaurants and fast food outlets, 2,200 sweetmeat shops, 2,100 furniture outlets, 880 beauty parlours, 660 community centres, 1,040 departmental shops, departmental stores and general stores, 4,630 jewellery shops and 20,000 medium and large wholesale and retail outlets across the country.
Of them, 216 hotels, 787 restaurants and fast food outlets, 238 sweetmeat shops, 62 furniture shops, 623 medium and large wholesale and retail outlets, 307 jewellery, 370 general and departmental stores and 21 community centres and 154 beauty parlours installed the electronic machines.

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