Professional groups including the Government Medical Officers’ Association have asked the government for a fairer income tax structure three days before the 2027 Budget, arguing that salaried employees are taxed on their gross pay while business owners are taxed only on what they make after costs.

The call was reported by the Daily Mirror on Monday evening. GMOA Media Spokesman Dr. Chamil Wijesinghe said the revisions made to tax policy last year were insufficient and that further measures were needed to address the concerns of professionals.

The argument is structural, not about rates

The central claim is not that income tax is too high but that it is assessed on the wrong base. Professionals and employees in the public, semi-government and private sectors are taxed on their gross monthly income, Wijesinghe said, while business owners are taxed on profits.

“This is highly unfair. Imagine what would happen to a business if it were taxed on its total revenue instead of its profits. That is effectively what is happening to professionals.”

He said professionals were not seeking exemption from taxation, but a “reasonable and affordable” structure.

What has been proposed, and to whom

Wijesinghe said a series of analytical proposals had been prepared after an in-depth study, designed to reduce the tax burden on professionals while maintaining the existing number of tax files and strengthening the tax net — that is, without narrowing the base. They were developed with groups representing professionals, including the United Professionals’ Alliance and the GMOA.

A request has been submitted to the Presidential Secretariat seeking discussions on the proposed changes. Wijesinghe said he was disappointed at the absence of any meaningful engagement with the authorities.

He welcomed President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s decision to disclose some Budget proposals before the presentation, calling the proposed tax revisions a positive development, and said both the President and the National People’s Power had acknowledged the need to revise existing tax policy.

The fiscal frame the request runs into

The 2027 Budget is due in Parliament on Thursday, 12 November. On Monday the Daily FT set out the constraints around it.

The President has already signalled a further rise in the PAYE threshold, which has moved from Rs 100,000 to Rs 150,000 — a commitment this desk reported on 7 November. He has also promised a staged VAT reduction over two to three years, the removal of taxes on educational materials, and said a property tax proposed under the International Monetary Fund programme has been deferred for another year, the government having told the IMF that the Budget’s revenue measures will be sufficient without it.

Those pledges sit against a three-stage public sector basic salary increase the President said would cost an additional Rs 330 billion by 2027. Under the debt restructuring, revenue must stay above 15.3% of GDP in 2026 and 15.4% in 2027, and the government has locked in a primary expenditure ceiling of 12.9% of GDP. The IMF programme ends in March 2027, with debt service stepping up in 2028.

This is the tension in Monday’s request: relief is being sought from a Budget that is working to a revenue floor. The Daily FT figures also answer a question this desk flagged as unreported on 7 November — what the revenue constraint on PAYE relief actually is.

Not reported

The filing attaches no numbers to the professionals’ proposals — no threshold, no band structure, no estimate of what the relief would cost revenue or how the tax net would be strengthened to offset it. It does not say when the submission reached the Presidential Secretariat, or whether any reply was received beyond the lack of engagement described.

It does not name the bodies making up the United Professionals’ Alliance or say how many people they represent, and it records no response from the government, the Treasury or the Inland Revenue Department. Wijesinghe cited “the Pay-As-You-Earn tax system introduced in 2018” as an example of a previous approach to taxing employees; the filing does not explain what that reference denotes, and it is not interpreted here.

On sourcing. The Daily Mirror is the only verified newsroom to have filed on this statement, which was published at 9.06 p.m. Colombo time. This desk searched the Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, Hiru News, EconomyNext, Daily FT, island.lk, Daily News, News.lk, Lanka Business Online and the Sunday Times. The Daily FT report is cited above for the fiscal context it supplies, and is not corroboration of the GMOA statement — it covers the President’s pre-Budget pledges, a separate matter.