The Regional Tax Office (RTO) has estimated that one million taxpayers will file income tax statement this fiscal year. This was announced by Karachi RTO Director General Israr Rauf at a press conference here on Tuesday.
He said to increase the tax net, the tax office had decided to set up tax help kiosks across the city from September 3 to facilitate the existing taxpayers and broaden the tax base by attracting further 0.5 million new taxpayers. The metropolis had a population of 175 million with the potential of 1.597 million taxpayers. Currently, only 0.5 million taxpayers were registered with Karachi RTO, he said.
He said that about 50 kiosks would be established in all 18 towns. The opening ceremony would be held at Park Towers on September 3 and it would be inaugurated by Chairman of Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) Abdullah Yusuf. The objective of help kiosks was to educate the taxpayers and the RTO planned to organise workshops to highlight changes introduced in the tax law.
"At present, the country's tax to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio stands at nine percent, which is lowest in the region. A two-pronged strategy is being adopted by the RTO to increase the taxpayers population," he said.
In the first place, efforts would be made to broaden the tax base by attracting new taxpayers and in second place efforts would be made to consolidate the existing tax base by checking evasion and misdeclaration.
He said that these measures were taken to achieve the FBR's target of improving the tax to GDP ratio to 15 percent by 2015. He though the revenue collection targets for the last couple of years had been surpassed and current fiscal year target was set at Rs 1.025 trillion, the tax-GDP ratio were, however, still lowest in South Asia.
He said that to identify a greater part of taxpayers' population, his office would concentrate on hunting potential taxpayers. Rauf said that under the enforcement plan, the RTO would cross match the data obtained from the tax returns with the data bank created through the efforts of proposed internal control cell and would also identify non-filers of tax returns.
About web-based e-filing, he said that taxpayers could also use the automated system for filing their statements. To a query about taxpayers' reservations over e-filing, he said that there were some problems occurred during the initial stage of this programme. But after detailed discussions with all the stakeholders, the problems had been resolved and the programme was running successfully, he added.
Comments
Comments are closed.