Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Colombo· 4 March 2025 ·Procedural: Ministerial Statement: Online Safety Act and tax on export services

Public Finance

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Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva questioned the Government’s proposal to tax online service exporters, contrasting it with the absence of taxation on online casinos. He asked why online casinos are not being charged even a 5 per cent tax while online workers could face a 15 per cent tax, urging the Deputy Minister to address this apparent disparity.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Thank you.

¶ 02 Hon. Deputy Minister, you said you will tax those exporting online services. Leave that aside for a moment. Consider online casinos. Take your phone now and Google “online casino” — see how many there are. You are not charging even 5% tax from them. I need not name them; just look online. If we can charge 15% from those working online, why aren’t we taxing online casinos?

Provenance

Source: Hansard, Tuesday, 4 March 2025 ·No. 1742359468086980 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
Page · column: not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
Permalink: /lk/speeches/10243

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Cite as: Hon. (Dr.) Harsha de Silva. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 4 March 2025. No. 1742359468086980. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/10243