Efforts on to bring restaurants into sales tax net

Regional Tax Office (RTO) Lahore has launched an exercise to check the sale of different restaurants of the provincial metropolis, to bring them into sales tax net.
"We have constituted a team of 10 honest and upright officers from the regional tax office. These officers would be posted at two different restaurants every week, one registered under sales tax and the other unregistered, to check whether their sales are according to their claims and unearth any tax evasion," said Chief Commissioner RTO-I Lahore Raana Ahmad while talking to Business Recorder here on Tuesday.
She said the exercise had already been launched from this Monday and monitoring of two restaurants had brought interesting results to light with regard to sales claim made by the owners and the actual sale monitored by the RTO officers. Without disclosing the names of these restaurants, she said that one of those restaurants was hesitant to get itself registered under sales tax claiming that its annual sales was less than rupees five million. Nevertheless, she said, during the two days of monitoring it was revealed that the restaurant's daily sale on average was Rs 100,000.
"The team would monitor the sales of these two restaurants for one week and then bring them to tax net. Average annual sale of each restaurant would be calculated in the light of weekly sales. As per law, any restaurant making a sale of Rs 16,666 per day has to get itself registered under sales tax, while the restaurants checked were making around Rs 100,000 per day," she added.
Chief Commissioner RTO-I said that her team would continue this exercise whole year and after recording the actual sales, owners of these restaurants would be asked to pay sales tax accordingly from July last. She hoped that this vigilance by the RTO would force the restaurant owners to honestly declare their sales and deposit sales tax, adding it would not only help to bring new restaurants under tax net but also detect those filing lower returns and evading actual tax.
Talking about other steps taken by her office, she said that a dedicated Broadening of Tax Base (BTB) section had been established with an additional commissioner as its head. She said that from January 1 to February 8, her office issued notices to about 23,000 people to file returns after collecting the information from different sources. However, she regretted that only 1,000 people approached the regional tax office in response to those notices.