The Federal Board of Revenue has so far not been able to create a national data warehouse, as the authorities have selected just one local consultant for networking of federal taxes data with the banks, National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), land records and other external sources of taxpayer's information.
Sources told Business Recorder on Thursday that the FBR would ink the contract with the local consultant on fulfilment of legal formalities. The existing mechanism clearly delays the implementation of the project as a single consultant can't handle the whole process.
As the consultant would start basic work for establishing warehouse, it seemed that the project is in the initial phase under the World Bank-funded Tax Administration Reform Project (Tarp). The objective for creation of data warehouse is to improve organisational efficiency for integration of direct taxes, sales taxes, customs, audit and Risk Management Unit (RMS) of the FBR.
It would be instrumental in promoting compliance through strengthened audit and enforcement capacity and transparent and high quality to services. The facility would also improve trade facilitation through modern and internationally acceptable customs procedures; along with improving integrity and fairness in tax administration.
It would also help in transparent and efficient instant access to tax records and related data. The consultant would carry out a strategic review of the FBR data warehousing and make an assessment for outsourcing the project, if needed. The consultant will also specify hardware component requirements; services to be provided by the vendors; testing and acceptance criteria and specify the data requirements.
Sources said that the board wanted to incorporate maximum data of taxpayers including the information available with 40 major withholding agents and banks into the "Nexus" Data Warehouse" to bring unregistered persons within the tax net. The board is making necessary arrangements for the development of a third party database to broaden the tax base.
The system will verify taxpayer's data from external sources like banks, property record, utility bills and motor vehicles registration to discover new taxpayers and ascertain actual income of existing registered persons.
The board wanted to analyse its database and correlate it to various external data sources to identify macroeconomic trends, anomalies and opportunities to timely formulate and fine tune the policy. This would include sectoral data, tariff slabs, commodity data, regional data, demographic data, exemptions data etc to analyse impact of policy on economic environment on monthly/quarterly and yearly basis.
The system would also examine the impact of exemptions on a specific sector like automobile manufacturers over the last three years and its correlation to the liberalisation of policy pertaining to import of automobiles. It would give an in-depth analysis about the contribution of a specific sector in taxes against its share to GDP. The impact of changes in tax rates on revenue collection in a specific sector would also be analysed.