18,000 new sales tax-payers detected for registration

The Collectorate of Sales Tax (Enforcement) has detected over 18,000 new taxpayers for registration under the Sales Tax net. The collectorate sources revealed on Monday that of the total new 18,224 taxpayers spotted on information from various sources include 14,933 distributors, agents and dealers, 3000 retailers, 2681 wholesalers and 23 car dealers. The drive to identify new taxpayers, aimed at broadening the tax net, was launched in October this year on the directives of the Central Board of Revenue (CBR).
Sources said that the list of non-taxpayers had been forwarded to the Sales Tax Collector to issue notices asking them to get registered under the Sales Tax Act and start filing monthly tax returns.
The drive has been launched under the new CBR policy to search for new taxpayers instead of burdening the existing ones. The CBR policy makers hope that with the increase in number of taxpayers the existing tax rates may also be lowered.
The sources said that information about the new taxpayers had been collected from the main database maintained by CBR, Regional Commissioner of Income Tax, Southern Region, and Large Taxpayer Unit (LTU) and Pakistan Revenue Automaton Limited (Pral).
The Enforcement authorities also sent letters to the registered manufacturers asking them to provide list of unregistered wholesalers and distributors dealing with them. Letters were also sent to the Large Taxpayer Unit, which deals with multi-national and major national companies, asking it to provide names of wholesalers and retailers dealing with these commercial enterprises.
Member CBR Information Service (MIS) also helped the Collectorate to detect about 3000 retailers whose annual turnover was above rupees five million.
The information about the highest number of 14655 would-be taxpayers was collected from the manufacturers registered with the Enforcement Cell.
The LTU provided information about 278 distributors, agents, dealers and retailers, and 237 wholesalers, distributors, dealers and agents and 23 car dealers.
To a question the sources said that the practice of carrying out field surveys had been stopped on directives from the CBR following complaints of harassment of taxpayers by the field staff. It was also against the CBR policy of minimising contacts between the taxpayers and collectors, which lead to corruption, sources added.