President of Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) Mahfooz Elahi has said Reformed General Sales Tax (RGST) is totally unacceptable to the business community as it will create a number of problems along with increase in inflation.
Addressing a meeting of the representatives of markers and industrial sector on Saturday he said to generate additional revenue; government should look other options like bringing real estate and agriculture income into the tax net. According to him, these sectors must be taxed to increase the base of taxpayers and confidence of existing taxpayers needs to be improved. "The government must create an environment of trust. Harassment and forced taxation will not bring the desired results, he added.
Elahi said that majority of the private sector trade did not have a clear understanding of RGST, and even government has not taken any initiative for creating positive awareness about it to let the people know about collection mechanism of taxes under RGST. He further stated that government should have series of meetings with the trade bodies across the country to discuss pros and cons of the RGST and its effects on the general public.
He said that mass awareness programmes needed to be conducted to avoid any state of confusion but government has failed to adopt this strategy due to unknown reasons. The representative of the business community out-rightly rejected the move of implementation of RGST and said that government must revisit its strategy for tax collection to avoid harassment and not to over burden the people, who are already under a great stress due to poor planning of the government.-PR