Encouraging corruption

By Md. Golam Mannan Chowdhury On e-mail
19 August 2006, 18:00 PM
I came to know from a well informed person that there is no bar to purchasing any number of apartment or any quantity of land. The buyer has to only pay a negligible amount of source tax. What is more perplexing is that, his money becomes even white after payment of this source tax. Interestingly, nobody would like to know the actual source whenever one wants to pay the source tax. It has given such a boom to real estate business that it is making huge profits, in spite of an apparent economic slowdown.

Now, such a situation naturally frustrates citizens like me, who having led a clean life, cannot even dream of a plot or flat despite the fact that, I voluntarily retired from a prestigious government job. It is due to the inability to pay the exorbitant price of apartments which had witnessed a spiralling in the recent years. It is generally assumed that when something starts coming up in large numbers, the price automatically goes down. But here a diametrically opposite trend is taking place because of a close nexus between government agencies and corrupt practitioners.

It is more than a farce to constitute tax ombudsman or even an independent Anti-Corruption Bureau in one hand and allow corrupt people to thrive on their ill gotten money on the other. It will only widen the gaps in the society as money is mostly being concentrated in the hands of a few, who earn it cheaply and spend it badly.

That is the reason why our so called filthy rich people do not show up in the list of highest tax payers or why neither they spend money on a free hospital or other social welfare activities. Will the government do something ?