Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) Dr Muhammad Shoaib Suddle on Friday said the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has penalised its 14 officers over the charge of misconduct on the recommendation of FTO office last year. He was speaking at a concluding session of workshop on "Fair Practices" organised by the Forum of Pakistan Ombudsman in collaboration with the Canadian National Development Agency at local hotel here.
He said the FTO office was making all efforts to avoid cumbersome and lengthy formal procedures for seeking justice by the 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 board. He said the FBR had penalised its 14 officers on the recommendation of FTO last year.
In 2010, the FTO office resolved 196,000 suo-moto complaints of the taxpayers while the figures of the same stood at 182,000 in 2011, he said and added that average time taken per individual complaint to decide was now 60 days as compared to 117 days in previous years.
Moreover, he said the FTO office had launched the FTO awareness campaign through Short Messaging Service (SMS) and Email to educate the masses to utilise this forum to redress their issues. Earlier, Kevin Fevrige, a Canadian ombudsman, in his speech lauded the efforts of the FTO office to address the problems of the taxpayers. He said the initiative to conduct the series of two workshops in Islamabad and Karachi was taken by FTO Shoaib and Canadian authorities last year. Later, the certificates were distributed among participates.