NBR's Tk88,000 Crore Shortfall and Its Bold Tk6.04 Lakh Crore Target for the Year Ahead

A Familiar Story: Big Growth, Bigger Gap

The National Board of Revenue closed the 2025-26 fiscal year having collected roughly Tk4,15,000 crore against a target of Tk5,03,000 crore, a shortfall of about Tk88,000 crore, according to preliminary figures released in early July 2026. On its own, the 12-percent-plus growth over FY25 collections looks respectable. Set against the government's own target, it is the latest instalment in a now-familiar pattern: NBR consistently grows its collection year over year, and just as consistently falls well short of what the budget assumed it would raise.

NBR revenue: FY26 target vs actual collection, and the FY27 target, in Tk crore. Source: NBR / media reports.

That gap matters well beyond an accounting exercise. Every taka of shortfall against the budgeted target has to be covered through some combination of higher borrowing, delayed government spending, or dipping into reserves earmarked for development projects, which is one reason infrastructure and social-programme budgets tend to face in-year cuts or slower disbursement whenever revenue collection disappoints.

The Even Bigger Ask for FY27

Rather than easing the target to something more achievable, the government has gone the other way: NBR's revenue target for the 2026-27 fiscal year has been set at Tk6,04,000 crore, a 20.07 percent jump over the FY26 revised budget of Tk 5,03,000 crore. Behind that number sits an even more ambitious structural goal — raising the tax-to-GDP ratio from 6.8 percent to 9.2 percent within the year, a jump that tax administrations elsewhere in the world typically take several years to achieve, if they manage it at all.

The strategy for getting there leans heavily on widening the tax base rather than simply raising rates on existing payers. NBR currently counts about 1.28 crore registered income taxpayers, but fewer than 8 lakh active VAT payers, a gap officials have flagged repeatedly as evidence of how much economic activity sits outside the formal tax net, particularly in retail, services and informal-sector trade.

A Chairman Departs for Washington

Adding a layer of institutional uncertainty to this stretch target, Md Abdur Rahman Khan — NBR's chairman through much of this period of both strong growth and persistent shortfalls — was appointed on August 23, 2026 as Bangladesh's alternate executive director at the World Bank's Washington headquarters, a three-year contractual posting representing Bangladesh's constituency at the institution. Under the terms of the appointment, his post-retirement leave and related benefits are suspended and he must sever ties with other professional roles, strongly suggesting a full departure from NBR rather than a dual role. Official confirmation of his NBR successor had not been published at the time of writing.

What This Means If You Are a Taxpayer

A revenue authority under this much pressure to close a widening gap typically responds in a predictable set of ways: more aggressive enforcement and audits, particularly targeting sectors and individuals identified as under-reporting; continued digitisation of VAT and income tax filing to reduce leakage and make evasion harder to hide; and closer scrutiny of high-value transactions, property purchases and bank deposits that do not appear to match a taxpayer's declared income. None of this is exotic or unique to Bangladesh, but it does mean the coming year is a poor time to be casual about accurate, complete tax filing.

• If you are a registered taxpayer, expect continued pressure to file and pay through NBR's online systems, with paper-based processes increasingly treated as the exception rather than the norm.

• If your income has grown but your declared tax position has not changed proportionally, treat that mismatch as a genuine audit risk given NBR's stated focus on closing the base-widening gap, not just a theoretical concern.

• Businesses and individuals with VAT registration thresholds close to the mandatory limit should assume closer monitoring this year, given how explicitly NBR has flagged the shortfall between income and VAT taxpayer counts.

• Keep an eye on official NBR announcements for the FY27 finance act's specific rate and threshold changes, since a target this ambitious will very likely be accompanied by at least some rate adjustments beyond base-widening alone.

The Honest Outlook

Given that NBR has missed its target in essentially every recent fiscal year despite genuine collection growth, treating the Tk6,04,000 crore FY27 target as a hard ceiling on what will actually be collected would be optimistic. The more useful number for taxpayers and businesses to watch is not the target itself, but NBR's own mid-year progress reports and any announced policy measures — VAT rate changes, new withholding requirements, expanded TIN mandates — that typically follow when an in-year shortfall becomes apparent, usually surfacing around the January-February supplementary budget discussions.