The Central Board of Revenue has communicated the following clarification in response to the editorial titled "Ghost entities on Sales Tax roster", published in the Business Recorder dated 16th August 2006.
"It is clarified that as a part of ongoing reforms process, the Central Board of Revenue is conducting an extensive exercise for the cleansing of its database as well as to cross-match the particulars mentioned in various databases maintained by the board.
The exercise/task involves extremely efficient checks by the system to ensure that the data available for revenue analysis and forecasting shall be highly reliable. Besides, the objective is to guarantee that we enter the new era of automation with a markedly improved quality of data capable of being used as a tool for 'effective monitoring' and taxpayers' profiling.
Such gigantic task, involving extensive working and carried out on a mega scale is bound to bring on board some trivial issues that need not to be taken out of proportion.
"As regards the 6000 firms/registered persons reported in the editorial as the persons who had neither obtained the National Tax Numbers (NTN) nor traceable at the declared business addresses, it is clarified that they are in fact those registered persons who were neither carrying out any business activity nor they were filing sales tax returns for a considerable time. Moreover, the particulars in respect of these registered persons mentioned in the NTN Master Index do not match with the particulars mentioned in the sales tax database."-PR