The State Engineering Corporation says the use of low quality steel and inferior concrete cement mixture were the two main causes of the building collapse at Wellawatta which took the lives of several workers.
The state engineering corporation issuing an official statement regarding this matter confirmed that the reason for this devastation is the use of law quality building material.
With this incident atrocities of using law quality steel in the construction industry has come to the forefront and we will ask the Sri Lanka Standers Institution to come up with a better ploy to check if inferior steel is being sold in Sri Lanka. The state must take a bigger responsibility to directly interfere to maintain the quality of industrial steel to prevent such incident in the future,” a official from the State Engineering Corporation said.
It has also come to light that a massive tax fraud in the local steel industry is causing an annual loss of nearly Rs five billion to the state. “The manufactures do not pay the NTB and VAT taxes, but the relevant authorities ignore complaints due to the gratifications they are receiving from the manufacturers,” he said.
The frauds relates mainly to reinforcing bars, where the monthly sale is around 45,000 metric tons.
Legally for each ton sold, a 2% NTB and a 15% VAT have to be paid, but the sellers failed to comply with this. The actual sales translate into a required tax payment of more than Rs. 550 million per month, but only around Rs. 250 million is paid, causing an annual loss of close to Rs. 3.6 billion to the government coffers.
In addition, sales figures of steel cage and L-angles etc. too, are manipulated to deny nearly Rs. 120 million of taxes to the government. Furthermore, the income tax is calculated according to the manipulated figures and due to this more than Rs. five billion of tax money is lost to the state.
The manufacturers also use substandard raw materials, with reinforcing bars being produced mainly using locally available steel, not the imported steel as required.
For the removal of colloquiums in the steel, they use machinery powered by sludge, not the costly electricity powered ones which is an industry norm. (VW)
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