Missed the e-VAT Paper Return Deadline in Bangladesh? Here’s What Happens to Your VAT Account Now
If your business still had old hard-copy VAT returns sitting outside the online system past 30 June 2026, you’re not alone — and you need to deal with it now, because online VAT filing is no longer optional. From July 2026, NBR completely did away with manual VAT returns: every registered business must file through the e-VAT portal using Mushak 9.1, with no paper fallback. If your account wasn’t fully migrated before the deadline, it’s already affecting what you can and can’t do on the portal.
What NBR actually changed
Under the old system, hard-copy VAT returns filed at a VAT Commissionerate were typed into the e-VAT system manually by NBR staff at the Central Processing Centre — a slow process that often left taxpayers hit with automatic interest and penalties simply because their old paper return hadn’t been entered yet. To fix this, NBR issued a circular on 5 January 2026 introducing a new “Hard Copy Return Entry” sub-module, letting taxpayers enter their own previously-submitted paper returns directly into e-VAT, without penalty or interest, as long as the original paper return had been filed on time under Section 64 of the VAT and Supplementary Duty Act, 2012.