In a major move to bring real estate investors into the tax net, the Regional Commissioners of Income Tax have launched a countrywide exercise to analyse the data of persons engaged in buying and selling of property in major posh areas of Karachi and Lahore.
Official sources told Business Recorder late Wednesday night that the decision has been taken in the national tax conference chaired by Secretary General Revenue Division and Chairman CBR M. Abdullah Yusuf. Senior income tax officials of Karachi and Lahore informed the conference that over 45 percent of buyers and sellers of property registered with the provincial authorities are not filing income tax returns.
The same pattern has been witnessed in case of persons registered with the provincial motor registration authorities. It has been estimated that 45 percent of these persons in Karachi/Lahore are carrying out these activities without valid National Tax Numbers (NTNs).
Moreover, they are also not filing income tax returns. The RCITs would scrutinise income tax returns of the persons, who have purchased property in different high-class areas of Karachi and Lahore. It would be investigated that whether these persons have enough income to buy expensive property in posh areas. "What is the amount of income tax to be paid by these buyers and sellers of property", officials said.
The regional income tax departments have identified persons engaged in buying and selling of property in 5-6 different locations of Karachi. In case of non-filers of returns, the information available with the provincial registrars and other sources has been collected for further data analysis. In these cases, buying and selling of property has been witnessed, but there are no valid NTNs or returns.
Officials said that CBR Chairman has directed the RCITs to focus on real estate sector, buyers/sellers of motor vehicles and retail sector to discover the potential taxpayers. The CBR has maintained a database having third party information from various external sources. This data would now be practically utilised to check the investors in the real estate business.
This is a first major step towards establishment of 'Data Warehouse' of taxpayers. The information would be analysed from various aspects keeping in view data collected from various sources for the last many years. CBR Chairman has also issued instructions to the regional commissioners that the project would be replicated in all other major cities of the country after complete analysis of property data in Karachi and Lahore.
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