KATHMANDU, Sept 12: Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI) has begun scrutinizing buying and selling prices of essential commodities and taking actions against those involved in breaching the rules.
According to a senior DRI official, the department has established five monitoring centers at major transit points across the country and the centers have started collecting data of supply volumes of essentials to each trading centers.
"This will enable the government to track transport of essential goods, thereby helping to access supply and demand, including the names of individuals and companies engaged in trading of various goods," said the official.
Officials of the department said they have established checking centers at Itahari, Pathlaiya, Thankot, Kohalpur and Butwal and they have started inspecting movements of goods since last month. "The checking centers will will take actions if the goods were found without proper documents, mainly tax clearance documents," said the official.
The department has also set up a mechanism to cross-check the prices of essential commodities that the importers quote in receipts that they carry with them.
"We have collected the wholesale and retail prices of commodities from Nepal Food Corporation, National Trading Limited and Salt Trading Limited and the prices have been used to cross-verify the prices mentioned in the receipts," said the official.
He said arrangements have been made to track the retail prices of the goods and the traders will be fined if they were found have been gobbling up abnormally high profits.
The purpose of the new mechanism is to control overpricing and mobilizing additional revenue by punishing those involved in black marketing and artificially hiking the prices.
The official said the department will bring out a weekly evaluation report, which will help the department to figure out possible hoarding and black-marketing of daily essentials.
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