FBR likely to grant sales tax amnesty

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is likely to grant general sales tax amnesty to the taxpayers till December 31, 2008. The President, Karachi Sales Tax Bar Association (KSTBA), Khushnood A Khan informed Business Recorder on Wednesday said that the Chief Sales Tax, FBR, Abrar Ahmed Khan has forwarded a proposal to the head quarter in this regard.
Khan said he has agreed to the proposal during audit, which has recently been restored. The taxpayers would face hardships in meeting deadline, therefore the FBR is considering to grant general sales tax amnesty till December 31, 2008 to those taxpayers, who failed to file sales tax returns within the stipulated period.
To a question, he said that if the FBR announces general sales tax amnesty, all penalties would be removed and the taxpayers would have to pay only actual tax. Highlighting the problems being faced by the taxpayers, he said a large number of registration cases are pending because the NTNs and Sales Tax Registration Numbers (STRNs) were not rectified disabling the taxpayers to complete their registration process for e-filing of returns.
Further, he maintained that the local collectorates have not updated their data banks. Many people applied for deregistration and collectorates too have completed their audits, but those cases are still appearing as registered, he said adding that the taxpayers, already deregistered by FBR, are still receiving audit notices.
The KSTBA President cited that mutiple STRNs have been issued to a single NTN in many cases, causing difficulties for taxpayers to accomplish registration process and added that so far the FBR has not taken any positive measure to resolve the issue yet.
He said the department has received enormous complaints from taxpayers that the tax profile data, which was corrected by the local collectorates, is not updated in the main computer resulting unnecessary hurdle in processing of refund claims. Furthermore, he urged the FBR to take immediate steps to resolve the issue of actual number of tax return filers. He also urged that the data of taxpayers data should be updated in the records of both the main and local collectorates.