LAHORE: Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Revenue Dr Waqar Masood said that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has paid Rs91 billion refunds of exporters in the month of November 2020.

Talking to this scribe, he said the volume of refunds paid last year during the same period was even less than half. However, the FBR has expedited the process on the instructions of Prime Minister Imran Khan and no sales tax refund claim is pending with the FBR at present. All the pending claims have also been paid by the FBR besides the current ones, he added.

Similarly, he said, the FBR was committed to paying all the income tax refunds at the earliest while the adjustments would be entertained as per law.

It may be noted that the premier had instructed the FBR to clear all the pending refunds of the exporters to relieve the export-related industry from liquidity crunch, especially in view of the post-COVID economic meltdown. However, a large number of refunds are still pending which need to be disposed of on priority despite allocation of huge funds.

The exporters have approached the SAPM with a complaint that a huge amount of sales tax claims is deferred by the FASTER system, which requires normal processing by the tax authorities. These deferred claims need to be processed immediately but unfortunately the said deferred cases are being processed and funds of millions of rupees of each mill are stuck up for no fault on their part, said Shehzad Azam, an exporter.

Meanwhile, he said the exporters have proposed to set up a dedicated cell for manual processing of all deferred cases with the direction to ensure that no deferred claim remains pending for more than one month and the matter is not kept hanging indefinitely.

Some other exporters have also pointed out that the income tax refunds of a large number of exporters are pending for want of sufficient budgetary provisions. This situation is adding to financial woes of local manufacturers. They said a tax officer is empowered to allow adjustment of pending income tax refunds against the current tax liability. Many tax officers in the past have been allowing discharge of current sales tax liability against pending income tax refunds.

According to them, the tax payers should be allowed to adjust their current sales tax liabilities against pending income tax refunds.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020