The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has approached the National Database Registration Authority (Nadra) to get prepared a realistic and cost-effective estimates to establish a national data warehouse of taxpayers.
Sources told Business Recorder on Monday that the board has initially worked out cost estimates of around $8 million for data warehouse project through World Bank funding under Tax Administration Reform Project (Tarp).
However, the FBR has observed that the amount of $8 million is very high for this project. As Nadra has completed a data warehouse project in the past, it would be more appropriate to obtain ideas for such projects from other government organisations. The board has approached Nadra to get a fair idea of the cost estimates for this project.
Sources said the board wanted to incorporate maximum data of taxpayers, including the information available with 40 major withholding agents and banks into the "Nexux" Data Warehouse" to bring un-registered persons within the tax-net. The board is making necessary arrangements for the development of a third party database to broaden the tax base.
The board has identified type and format of information acquired from third parties and communicate requirements - resort to regulatory measures if called for towards persuasion/enforcement of the established information formats.
The system will verify taxpayer's data from external sources like banks, property record, utilities bills, and motor vehicles registration to discover new taxpayers and ascertain actual income of existing registered persons. The board wanted to analyse its database and correlate it to various external data sources to identify macroeconomic trends, anomalies and opportunities to timely formulate and fine tune the policy.
This would include sectoral data, tariff slabs, commodity data, regional data, demographic data, exemptions data, etc to analyse impact of policy on economic environment on monthly/quarterly and yearly basis.
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