EPF to be taxed to raise funds to shore up Govt.’s declining popularity: NPP

Claiming that the government was planning to impose a surcharge tax on EPF and ETF to raise funds not to be used for the wellbeing of the people, but on desperate efforts to shore up the government’s rapidly declining popularity, National Peoples’ Power (NPP) said today that it will take every effort to ensure that the EPF and ETF will not be affected by the surcharge tax.

The NPP said in a statement that the government should immediately take steps to exempt these funds from the surcharge tax and if the government continued this disastrous policy, they would rally all the working people against it.

“The EPF and ETF belong to the working people of this country – from the lowest to the highest employee in the private and semi-government sectors. We know that government actions in the past – such as investment in Greek bonds – resulted in massive losses to these funds. We are also quite sure that the income earned by this tax will not be used for the wellbeing of the people, but rather on desperate efforts to shore up this government’s rapidly declining popularity, the NPP said.

The government’s claims that they did not intend to tax EPF and ETF and that it was the Inland Revenue Act interpretation of the term ‘company’ that has resulted in this situation was not true.

“We do not think this was a problem of ‘interpretation'. If so, those drafting the bill should have included a specific clause to exempt the EPF and ETF from the surcharge tax. The fact that they did not do so indicates that the government intended right along to impose this tax on workers provident and pension funds. They clearly saw this as an easy target for income generation, a statement issued by the NPP said. (Ajith Siriwardana)