Bangladesh, Aug. 26 -- The National Board of Revenue (NBR) may have lost as much as Tk 1.88 trillion in the 2022-23 fiscal year due to widespread exemptions and evasion in the country's value-added tax system, according to new research.

The findings were presented on Tuesday at a dialogue organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a private research think tank, at a hotel in Dhaka.

CPD Senior Research Associate Tamim Ahmed said the study sought to determine the effective rate of VAT, which was found to be 11.7 percent.

"With that, we have seen how much our actual VAT collection should be," he said.

"That means, even after excluding the VAT collection, we can see that there is around Tk 1.88 trillion showing."

According to the...