10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

Hon. Chithral Fernando, Attorney-at-Law

Samagi Jana Balawegaya· Puttalam· 21 January 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Questions (Multiple Questions)

Public Finance
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Hon. Chithral Fernando questioned the Government on the increase in withholding taxes despite relief announced on PAYE. He highlighted delays and lack of awareness among eligible senior citizens seeking refunds under the mechanism limited to Sri Lankan resident citizens aged 60 or above with annual income not exceeding Rs. 1.2 million, and asked whether action would be taken with a clear timeline to address the bottlenecks.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 My second Supplementary Question: On PAYE you highlighted relief, but you did not speak about the increase in withholding taxes. The refund mechanism requires applicants to be Sri Lankan resident citizens aged 60 or above with annual income not exceeding Rs. 1.2 million. Many senior citizens are unaware; even those who apply are waiting long due to bottlenecks. Will you take action with a clear timeline?

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Tuesday, 21 January 2025 ·No. 1737707091008005 ·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/27119

Cite as: Hon. Chithral Fernando, Attorney-at-Law. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 21 January 2025. No. 1737707091008005. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/27119