In a bid to improve the performance of the Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) office, the newly appointed FTO, Dr Shoaib Suddle, has issued dismiss orders to all the advisers, it was reliably learnt on Friday. Sources told Business Recorder that the FTO was of the view that the advisers had failed to provide fruitful results, causing deadlock in complaints, which raised disenchantment among taxpayers.
They said the core responsibility of the FTO office was to diagnose, investigate, redress and rectify any injustice done to a person through mal-administration by functionaries administering tax laws. The sources further said the FTO office would make all out efforts to avoid cumbersome and lengthy formal procedures for seeking justice by taxpayers, besides adopting unbiased and professional approaches to decide matters.
"Therefore, the department is taking bold steps to improve and modify the performance to achieve the highest standards in terms of number and quality of recommendations to the FBR. The decision to dismiss all advisers is one of the measures to idealise the vision and mission of the FTO office."
They said all 11 contractual advisers, who were serving at Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, were computer illiterate, which was one of the major reasons for FTO's poor performance. Keeping this in view, the FTO had planned to recruit computer literate persons for the post to improve the performance of the department, they added. However, some bigwigs in the FTO office have expressed their resentment against the decision, saying, "the decision could not provide effective results and the things would get worse as the time goes by."
When contacted, Mobeen Ahsan, who was one of the advisers, confirmed that the lay off notices had been issued to all the advisers, saying they had received orders, according to which, all advisers would continue service till August 31, 2009. To a question, he dispelled the impression that the decision was a question mark on their performance, saying that if the advisers were inefficient, the Supreme Court would not have accepted several decisions taken by them. "At this time, questions and fingers are being raised on the performance of advisers but we are satisfied that we served our level best on this position," he maintained.