JUNE 7
With all the unimaginable corruption and scandals taking place in high places, anything that the government does arouses suspicion in this country.
And the Members of Parliament of the opposition parties were quick to question Finance Minister Prakash Mahat the other day if taxes had been manipulated to serve certain corporation houses. Their major concern was why and how an unauthorized person had found entry into the Finance Ministry chamber on the night of May 28 during the budget-making process to finalise the Finance Bill.
The post-budget discussion in the House of Representatives (HoR) was thus delayed by three hours on Tuesday over whether the matter should be probed or not by a parliamentary committee as it had been done in the past. Another accusation of the opposition parties involved the sudden influx of electric vehicles (EVs) just before the presentation of the budget for the fiscal year 2023-24 last week. Could information about the taxation changes have been leaked to the EV dealers in Nepal in advance? The new budget has hiked the customs duty on EVs with motors of 50-100 kW from 10 per cent to 15 per cent together with an excise duty of 10 per cent. As many as 1100 EVs are said to have arrived suspiciously just before the budget presentation, which, according to the opposition party members, have caused a revenue loss amounting to a whopping Rs 900 million to the government.
ernment.
Similar accusations were made against former finance minister Janardan Sharma last year that an unauthorised person had entered the Finance Ministry during the finalisation of the Finance Bill to manipulate the tax rate. He had re-signed from the post following the formation of an 11-member parliamentary special committee to facilitate the investigation. However, the committee concluded that there was no involvement of an unauthorised person in the budget preparation, and Sharma was given a clean chit. Suspicion of the government and the parties arises due to their close nexus with the business community who fund their expensive election campaigns, among others. Budgets have been known to be manipulated to serve certain business houses in the past, which is very hard to unearth or probe by bodies investigating corruption.
Responding to the allegations, Finance Minister Mahat clarified that he had not allowed any middlemen to interfere in the budgetary process and that the "unauthorised" person in question, Ram Krishna Shrestha, had been hired as a junior assistant to type the Harmonisation Code (HS) in the tax rates and had no role in influencing the taxes on goods, imported or otherwise. He also told the House that the government had judiciously taxes imported EVs, but their dealers were not transferring the benefit they got from the government to the customers. Following the response, the government has been given the benefit of the doubt, but it remains to be seen if it can deliver what has been promised in the government policy and programmes for the next fiscal year. Only implementation of the budget in both letter and spirit will remove any doubts that the public may still harbour about the government's integrity and honesty to push this country economically forward.
Suspicion of the govt and parties arises due to their close nexus with business houses
A version of this article appears in the print on June 8, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
