Africa-Press – Namibia. FNB NAMIBIA clients this Tuesday woke up to deductions from their current accounts of accrued deductions for stamp duty – another type of tax imposed by the treasury on payments, agreements and shares among other things.
After several drags on social media, the bank responded on its Twitter page, saying the deductions were done by law.
“The Stamp Duty Act requires automatic deductions on every transaction made via the bank. Due to a delay in the collection on some customer accounts, a catch-up deduction has been debited to your account today,” the bank said this week.
In Namibia, stamp duty is levied by law on an instrument ranging from contracts to agreements, but for banks, these would mainly involve debit entries on cheque, credit card and savings accounts.
These levies are at N$0,20 for a debit entry on a cheque account, N$0,20 for a credit card debit entry, and N$0,10 for a savings account.
Debit entries mainly refer to all payments from accounts. It is not clear why the bank had allowed transactions to accumulate until a deduction was made, however, FNB said it regretted “the inconvenience caused by this accrued deduction”.
FNB Namibia has the biggest clientele in terms of individual customers in Namibia, and boasts a whopping N$31 billion deposits balance, of which N$12 billion sits in current accounts, N$10 billion in savings accounts, and some N$8 billion in call accounts.
Stamp duty revenue will be paid over to the taxman.
The treasury is expecting to rake in over N$126 million through stamp duty for the 2022/23 fiscal year, national budget documents show.
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