Regional Tax Office (RTO), Karachi has collected Rs 28.95 million additional sales tax from 12 prominent delis in ten days. According to the official statistic made exclusively available to Business Recorder revealed that the department has recovered over 135 percent additional sales tax after imposing strict monitoring of the sales of some 12 famous eateries.
Sources said that the daily average sales of the restaurants were Rs 24.13 million however, they had shown only Rs 10.26 million in their ledger books, which was less than half of their actual sales. To a question, they said the department has received immense complaints against these delis, which were not depositing the sales tax to the government treasury, despite charging it from the customers.
Therefore, FBR has granted special permission to the collectorate of Sales Tax and Federal Excise (Enforcement) to post their officials at some 12 delis as priority to plug the revenue leakage. The exercise has revealed that some of the restaurants have been depositing only one-fourth or one-fifth of their daily tax collection, providing huge losses to the national exchequer.
Furthermore, they said that some unregistered restaurants were collecting sales tax from the customers and depositing the same in their personal bank accounts. Sources informed that FBR has planned to extend the level of monitoring to other restaurants and hotels suspected for evasion of tax and hoped that similar exercise may be carried out in other big cities.
They said that some restaurants have closed advance booking for parties to suppress the normal level of their actual sales, adding these tactics would not hamper the monitoring process. They said that the concerned authority is satisfied with the results and the exercise will lead to a significant increase in the revenue collection.
They ensured that the monitoring of the sales records did not create hurdles in the normal business activity. They further said that the transactions of the delis would be monitored until the restaurants would fairly deposit its actual sales tax to the national kitty.