Taxpayers are going to miss the October 31, 2014 deadline for e-filing of income tax returns for tax year 2014, as Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) despite enormous complaints from the stakeholders failed to resolve the issues related to the newly-introduced system IRIS. The FBR has been urged to extend the deadline for e-filing till December 31 to facilitate the taxpayers.
In a letter sent to Chairman FBR, Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) said that IRIS the system had not been functional for days due to unknown reasons. Moreover, it said that information sought by the system did not correspond with the earlier requirement of the return as such the gathering/compiling of such information was quite time consuming.
For example, it said, in the preceding year's tax returns, taxpayer was required only to submit gross salary under the head of salary. However, taxpayers in new return is required to bifurcate their income from salary to gross pay, allowances, reimbursements and other payments, which create further compilation as employer's certificate does not contain such bifurcation.
KTBA further said that there was no provision in the return in respect of refund application and no power was given to taxpayers to update his or her profile as the same was made available in the preceding year's tax return. It said that no column for Foreign Currency Account was available in the wealth statement and in the cases where federal securities such as special saving certificates, defence saving certificates were purchased from banks, the system did not provide the name of bank but its field was restricted only to national saving centers.
Similarly in the case of profit on debt earned by an individual from a private arrangement, there is no space available to mention the name, identification of the source from where profit on debt has been received. KTBA was of the view that columns no 9 to 11 of wealth statement was cumbersome and impracticable, which should be replaced as per the relevant column of the wealth statement of tax year 2013.
Furthermore, it said that printed report of IRIS software was not on the basis of prescribed format of income tax return as per income tax rules, 2002 and added that taxpayers were also unable to add rows in any part of return, annexure and wealth statement to fill up or add data.
"NTN number in wealth statement is neither updating automatically nor allowing making any updates, besides appearing as (Fixed) 01234567 in the statement," it maintained. The letter further said that tax was computed automatically at the rate of 34 percent in the return of income for company whereas the rates were different in the case of banks, oil companies, modarbas etc. Therefore, it is suggested that computation of tax should be allowed to taxpayers instead of being done automatically. KTBA said that taxpayers were unable to meet the deadline of e-filing of income tax returns for tax year 2014, due to aforesaid problems; hence FBR in order to facilitate the taxpayers may extend the deadline till December 31, 2014.
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