President, Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Iftikhar Ahmed Vohra, has urged the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to announce an amnesty scheme for the non-filers of General Sales Tax (GST) returns. In a letter to FBR, Vohra noted that the number of non-filers had been increasing due to some very stringent provisions of GST laws and procedures.
He was of the view that the proposed amnesty would provide a large number of taxpayers the opportunity to return to the tax regime and would eliminate the chronic non-filers who did not have the capacity and required competency to comply with the current tax laws and procedures.
He said that the proposed amnesty scheme should be announced for those non-filers of GST returns who had been filing income tax returns of Nil or nominal amounts within a certain bracket. The KCCI President noted that a large number of small traders, retail shops and manufacturing units in the cottage industry had not been filing sales tax returns for several years.
He said that particularly in Karachi, the issue was compounded by frequent shut downs and unstable law and order situation that had forced many small businesses to close down. He further observed that in many cases the amount of penalty ran into hundreds of thousands and beyond the capacity of registered persons to pay. Therefore, such individuals and businesses became non-compliant, while the same registered persons had been filing NIL returns of income tax.
He said that besides announcing amnesty scheme for such non-filers of GST returns, they should also be given the option to either de-register from the sales tax regime or resume filing the returns without penalties. "They may be required to submit an affidavit that they have not conducted any business in the period that they did not file the sales tax returns," he added.
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