FBR asked to remove defects from taxpayers'' profiles

The World Bank (WB) review mission has asked the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to remove defects in the tax profiles of registered taxpayers for updating their business addresses and economic activities to trace non-compliant persons for recovery of taxes.
The WB has submitted a report to the FBR on the Tax Administration Reform Project (TARP) to maintain updated ''Taxpayer Profile Information'' for taking enforcement action against the non-compliant taxpayers. The WB has taken notice that certain registered persons are not available on their business addresses in cases of issuance of notices by the tax department. The wrong addresses declared in the tax profiles should be corrected to have an updated database of addresses and business activities of the registered persons.
According to the WB report, efforts to improve enforcement on compliance with filing and payment requirements depend strongly on the quality of the taxpayer register information. In the case of FBR, the taxpayer profile information needs to be cleaned up for a significant number of taxpayers. In particular, information on taxpayer address and economic activity needs to be updated, the report said.
The Enforcement Wing of the FBR would design procedures to clean up the profile information and request FBR Members Domestic Operations to put them in place. First, an IT system is needed to allow field officers to flag problems with address and economic activity in the taxpayer register. For example, any time that a notification is returned because the address was wrong, this would be registered in the system. This would ensure new notifications would not be sent to that taxpayer until his address is updated. Also, this flag would allow officers to select cases for cleaning up. The FBR Member Enforcement would also request Member Operations to establish task forces in the RTOs to clean up taxpayer''s profile information.
The WB has recommended to the FBR to develop and put in place a system to flag taxpayers with address and economic activity information problems. The WB has further asked the Board to establish Task Forces and set targets at the Regional Tax Offices (RTOs) to clean up the taxpayer profile information, according to the WB report.