KARACHI: The Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association (PPMA) has warned that a crisis would emerge with regard to the availability of medicines in the local market owing to the recently introduced taxation regime under which the drug manufacturers and distributors are responsible to pay advance tax after collecting it from the retailers.
"The new tax regime has been imposed on the pharmaceutical sector all of a sudden without any preparation at such a time when the availability of life-saving drugs is of utmost importance as the coronavirus health emergency has been continuing," said the PPMA Chairman Tauqeer Ul Haq.
Tauqeer Ul Haq was speaking at a press conference here at Press Club on Thursday along with other office-bearers of the PPMA. He said the producers and distributors associated with the pharmaceutical business didn't have the required capacity, manpower, and mechanism to collect the advance tax from the drug retailers.
"We simply don't have any mechanism to keep a check on the retailers to ascertain as who among them are filers and who are not for advance tax collection," he said.
The PPMA Chairman said that there were around 40,000 pharmacy owners in the country as collecting advance tax from them was no doubt a gigantic exercise. "A massive tax collection machinery is required to collect this tax as only the state could fulfil this task," he said.
He said the FBR in fact had passed on its responsibility to the manufacturers and distributors of drugs as they had been assigned this revenue collection duty suddenly without giving them any time to do preparation for the same.
He said the retailers were obviously reluctant to share their personal taxation data with the manufacturers and distributors of medicines. "In such a situation, the retailers have stopped receiving medicine supplies from the distributors creating a shortage of drugs in the market," Haq said.
The PPMA Chairman urged the government to immediately withdraw the new taxation regime as its further persistence could create a medicine crisis in the market at a time when the coronavirus emergency is far from over.
Otherwise, good manufacturers of medicines will not be responsible for the drug shortage in the country during the era of Covid-19, he added.
Former PPMA chairman, Dr Kaiser Waheed, said on the occasion that the relevant state institutions should duly think before adopting such policies in view of the fact that access to medicines was an essential component for building a healthy society.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021