LAHORE: The enforcement wing of Punjab Revenue Authority (PRA) is accused of raising tax demands on account of services charged specifically excluded from the purview of sales tax withholding.
According to sources, the authority officials were involved in imposing dual taxation as tax demands are being raised on the services against which the taxpayers have had already charged and deposited the sales tax with the respective tax authorities. They have further pointed out that the tax authorities were imposing wrong penalties while issuing show-cause notices in haste without prior scrutiny of the evidence.
In most of the cases, they said, flimsy grounds are provided in the official correspondence with regard to the opportunities provided to taxpayers to file documentary evidence. Taxpayers are also blamed for not contesting their cases properly while failing to submit documents to substantiate their claims.
However, some tax experts are of the view that both fairness and grant of ample opportunity to taxpayers is absent from the assessment proceedings of on the part of the authority. The adjudicating officers are least bothered about dilating upon all the issues involved in a particular case and fail to make speaking orders after going through every piece of evidence produced by the taxpayers.
They claim that the tax authorities even fail to adhere to the relevant rules while denying the right of sufficient opportunity to establish their case by taxpayers.
They added that the tax authorities ignore the ledgers, correspondence invoices, break-ups, summary of expenses and vouchers submitted by the taxpayers to prove their expenditures in the shape of ‘freight and sales promotions’.
These tax practitioners have further pointed out that no documents provided by the taxpayers are looked into properly by the relevant authorities and a sense of hastiness can easily be smelled on the part of assessing officers while passing impugned orders by and large.
The irony of the prevailing in state of affairs in the PRA can be judged from the fact that they put wrong observations on record that the taxpayer had not produced a single document to substantiate his contention despite the supplying the respective record by him.
The sad part of the whole of the drama is that a tax demand worth millions of rupees is reduced to a few hundred thousand by the assessing officer simply to squeeze as much as possible out of a fake tax demand at the end of the day.
Those who challenge the extortion on the part of the department are supposed to bear with heavy fee of tax consultants to prove their case at the higher forums one after another. Otherwise, he is forced to pay fake demands besides bearing the burden of penalties and late payment surcharges.
In quite many other cases as well, it has been observed that the assessment orders have been finalized on the basis of such show-cause notices with tax liabilities according to percentage of bank’s branches operating in the province of Punjab.
Non-affording of proper opportunity in getting documents in such cases of taxpayers operating beyond the province create complications especially when time limitations do afford ample tune for further hearing opportunities. Also, the department spends heavily to prove a wrong assessment while pursuing it accordingly, sources added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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