The Regional Tax Office (RTO), Karachi has launched Tax Facilitation Campaign (TFC) to materialise the collection target of Rs 1.225 trillion set for the financial year 2008-09. Asrar Rauf told Business Recorder on Friday that RTO was striving to facilitate the taxpayers to file their returns of income for Tax Year-2008.
He said that noticeable growth had been witnessed in the number of returns during the last two years where 0.73 million returns were received as against 0.49 million ones during the tax-year-2006. Therefore, it was being expected that RTO, Karachi would receive over one million returns till 30th September 2008, he maintained.
Rauf said that the campaign was being launched on the directive of the Chairman FBR, Ahmad Waqar to materialise the tax collection mark. He added that Member Direct Taxes Irfan Nadeem had recently conducted detailed meeting with the senior tax officials of RTO Karachi to accelerate efforts to broaden tax base and maximise revenue collection.
To a question, he said that RTO, Karachi would establish about 50 Tax Facilitation Kiosks (TFK) at prominent business hubs across the city. While, two mobile Tax Facilitation Units (TFU) would be made available to the taxpayers to file their returns, DG, RTO revealed.
He said that the Kiosks and mobile units would also deal with issuance of National Tax Numbers (NTN) and claims of refund and added that RTO would hold seminars, workshops and corner meetings at important business centres to achieve the assigned target of over one million returns and make it successful. The business community would also be informed about the tax benefit offered in the recently launched Tax Schemes ie Investment Tax Scheme-2008 and Tax Arrears Settlement Incentive Scheme, 2008 through the campaign, he said.
The main purpose behind this move was to improve the Tax to GDP ratio which was currently below the required standards, he said and added that extensive efforts were underway to motivate taxpayers to file annual tax returns and pay their due taxes.
"The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) will be able to achieve four trillion mark by 2016 through better tax facilitation," quoted as saying. According to a research conducted by RTO, Karachi revealed that about 6.69million were unemployed, females 4.29 million, teenagers 0.34 million, unemployed senior citizens 0.75 million, expatriates and one million are illegal immigrants in the city.
Therefore, the city has the potential of 1.59 million taxpayers including 0.16 million working women, he further said. It was also observed that there were 1.76 million current account holders and 2.49 million saving account holders out of which only 0.76 million were registered taxpayers, he said.
Comments
Comments are closed.