The National Board of Revenue's collections soared 18.95 percent last fiscal year -- a disclosure that will be comforting to the government as it goes about progressively implementing larger budgets every year.

In fiscal 2016-17, the revenue authority collected Tk 185,071 crore, according to preliminary data disclosed yesterday.

The sum would beat the revised target of Tk 185,000 crore for the fiscal year. The collection target set for the NBR at the beginning of fiscal 2016-17 was Tk 203,152 crore.

This would be the third year in a row in which the NBR reached its target, the tax administrator said, while thanking the taxpayers for their cooperation.

The preliminary statistics though should be viewed cautiously as the actual collections end up being lower every year.

For instance, in fiscal 2015-16 as per preliminary data the NBR's collection was Tk 155,519 crore but according to finance division it was actually Tk 146,241 crore.

In the first ten months of the just concluded fiscal year, the NBR logged in Tk 142,758 crore, up 20 percent year-on-year.

The NBR said its collections last fiscal year would have been higher if: it could realise Tk 23,000 crore of dues from Petrobangla, Tk 40,000 crore  relief was not given to government and non-government institutions, and the banking sector did not see the 14 percent negative growth.

The collections tend to crescendo in the last two months of the fiscal year and this time it coincided with the month of Ramadan and the Eid holidays, which took off the momentum, the NBR said.

Besides, the preparation for the implementation of the VAT and Supplementary Duty Act 2012, which was scheduled to take effect from July 1, also distracted the NBR's end-of-year collection efforts.

The implementation of the new VAT law has now been pushed back by two years.

“Domestic demand is rising. It appears that there is some sort of improvement in tax administration,” Ahsan H Mansur, executive director of Policy Research Institute, told The Daily Star recently.

He, however, said actual collection might fall short of the NBR's claim of receipts: there have been instances of double counting of acknowledgement receipts at field offices and submission of fake ones.

The revenue target for the current fiscal year has been set at Tk 248,190 crore, meaning collections have to be 34 percent higher than last fiscal year's preliminary figures.

The higher target was set assuming that the new VAT law would be implemented, which would bump up collections.