IRB starts civil action against companies with RM728m in unpaid taxes

KUALA LUMPUR: The Inland Revenue Board (IRB) is taking civil action against companies that still have not paid taxes despite having been audited and investigated previously.
IRB CEO Datuk Sabin Samitah said the operation, named Ops Dakwa, involves 1,601 cases with a total of RM728 million in unpaid taxes. The operation was flagged off Monday morning.
“We are taking civil action on those who failed to pay their taxes and also we are going to take legal action on those who have been audited and investigated before, we have advised them to keep proper documents but we still find that they are not keeping proper documents,” he said during a dialogue at the GST Conference 2017 on Monday.
Speaking to reporters after the dialogue session, Sabin said IRB is going after the big companies, including public listed companies, most of whom have not paid their taxes.
“We are going to serve them the notice by hand and if they don’t want to have discussion with us on how they are going to pay the tax, we are going to wind up the company,” he said.
He said in most of the cases, IRB had given them time to pay and come up with instalment schemes as well. However, some of these companies did not pay according to the instalment schemes given to them by IRB.
Earlier at the dialogue, Sabin said IRB’s direction is simple, that is to create a level playing field by making compliance easy and non-compliance very difficult.
“So, for that to happen, we will continue to make our presence felt. It is very clear and simple. For those who comply, we will make it very easy for them but for those who don’t want to comply, we will make it very difficult,” he added.
On IRB’s decision to increase the penalty from 45% to 100% next year, he said this only applies to those who habitually evade taxes.
“We have been very lenient for the last two years, 2015 and 2016. Taxpayers who were investigated in either 2015 or 2016, if they settled their cases within that year, we are only going to impose a very low penalty. Much lower than 45%, maybe 15-20%.
“But we still find that quite a number of taxpayers didn’t declare the right amount of taxes. It is actually already in the Act that we can impose up to 300% but next year we would like to increase the penalty minimum from 45% currently to 100% but not for all taxpayers. It is for those who have become habitual tax evaders. They are the ones we are going to impose the 100% penalty on,” he said.
On the tax collection to date, Sabin said it is over 2% more than what was collected last year, for the same period, and IRB hopes to reach its RM127 billion target this year, driven by its various operations.