Discrepancy in ‘Tax notice’ by IRD
The recently published ‘Notice to tax payers’ by the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) in their website has a discrepancy.
I checked this “Notice to tax payers’ in the Sinhala web site of the IRD but the site directed me to an English notice which has a discrepancy according to my little knowledge of English.
Section 5 of the notice says “the interest income up to Rs.250,000 per month is exempted from Withholding Tax (WHT)” which implies that interest income of over Rs.250,000 of a month is taxable. So the bank will deduct the WHT from a person even if he has only one interest payment say of Rs.250,000 for example.
But section 6 of the notice says: “Income of an individual up to Rs.3,000,000 per annum from any source of income shall be exempted from income tax.” Therefore the person we took in the earlier example should be tax free.
So will this discrepancy be corrected by the IRD or will the IRD refund the money of the person who has already paid in excess as WHT due to this contradictory statement?
I hope the IRD will take notice of this discrepancy and rectify the matter.
Reader
Colombo