People pay peanuts to Caesar!

Just 2,40,686 of the 26m people are in tax net?

The biblical injunction, Pay unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s, is unheard of in Nepal.
Only one per cent of the population of 26 million, drawn from organised and formal sectors, pay tax. This after the number of taxpayers grew by 12.88 per cent after July 2006 and the put-out-to-pasture Caesar has, reportedly, refused to pay utility bills for long.
Last year the number of registered taxpayers stood at 2,13,209.
“It is too little,” says Deep Basnyat, director general at the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), clarifying that the exact number may go up by a little more, “If we provide PAN to each individual.”
According to the rule, tax is deducted at source in the case of salaried individuals.“A company might have a hundred employees, whose tax is paid under one company Permanent Account Number (PAN). A salaried individual has no separate PAN,” he adds.
PAN is a nine digit numeric code number issued by the IRD.
In its bid to widen and tighten the tax net and ensure that a larger number of people pay taxes, the government has made it mandatory for organised and formal sectors to register with the PAN system .“If an individual approaches us, we will provide PAN number,” says Keshav Adhikari, deputy director general at the IRD. “But individuals can also pay tax without registering with PAN.”
Experts suggest that PAN should be provided to every individual which will allowtaxpayers to know how much tax they pay to the government. To encourage the habitof paying tax, the highest tax-payer should be recognised and awarded by the government at the end of each fiscal year, they suggest.
The government must provide taxpayers with a certificate every year for the records, which could create a healthy social competition between individuals who have paid tax to the government from earnings or business.
“Once we awarded the highest taxpayer corporate house but the award drew a lot of criticism due to various reasons,” Adhikari says, adding that the system since then has been cancelled. “Due to security reasons, the name of the highest tax paying individual cannot be made public,” adds Basnyat.
“PAN must be made compulsory because lots of earning professionals are not paying tax,” says one official at the IRD. But Adhikari says, “Some of them have registered with the PAN system.”