The PNG IRC to track down tax offenders

Papua New Guinea is missing out on billions of Kina in taxes due to “black economy” businesses, Internal Revenue Commission (IRC) commissioner general Sam Koim says.

“IRC is improving its compliance activities and will prosecute tax crime offenders soon.

“There is a significant portion of businesses out there who are not complying, especially in the black economy worth billions of Kina.

“There are people moving big money, doing big transactions that are not detected. So, some of the things that we are doing is to detect and also bring them to comply and also file and pay their share of taxes,” he added.

Black economy refers to people who operate entirely outside the tax and regulatory system or who are known to the authorities but do not correctly report their tax obligations. “Soon we will be shutting down or deregistering businesses, deregistering Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) that have not been active.

“One of our projects this year is to deregister businesses that had not been active. We hope to complete this project by April.

“By then we will know how many of the TIN holders are actually in business, but are not complying,” he added.

He said tax crime prosecution was also a “do list”. “At the moment, our data is not set because we are still carrying out that big operation.

“We are having challenges and difficulties in securing other external cooperation.

“For tax crime, in order to do prosecution, it transcends our agency territorial jurisdiction.

“So we need the participation and collaboration of those agencies to successfully prosecute people who are evading tax.”

Source: The National/One PNG News

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