The Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Sunday questioned wisdom of the economic managers of the government behind the decision to slap additional tax on the telecom industry. The short-sighted decision will increase burden on masses, add to problems of the telecom sector and hurt the reputation of PML-N, it said.
An increase of 5 percent withholding tax can have an impact on foreign investment in the telecom sector; it can hurt network expansion plans of the operators and compromise quality of the service, said Dr Murtaza Mughal, President PEW.
He said that the decision based on fulfilling tax collection target of Rs 2.475 billion can reduce communication between people paving way for poverty and other problems. Dr Murtaza Mughal said that taxing the already heavily taxed sector can have undesirable impact on plan of the government to reduce budget deficit through auction of 3G licence.
He said that former government also unilaterally imposed Sales Tax on mobile phones hurting 85 percent of the poor and middle-class consumers only to get around 50 percent decline in sales.-PR
Comments
Comments are closed.