ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has constituted a committee comprising provincial revenue authorities/boards to resolve issues of national sales tax return for federal and provincial taxpayers across the country.

In this connection, the FBR has issued a notification, here on Friday.

On January 7, Finance Minister Tarin launched the “National Sales Tax Return” for all federal and provincial sales taxpayers with the resolve that it would promote standardisation of taxability and tax rates and automatic input credit and refunds.

According to the notification, after obtaining nominations from the provincial revenue authorities, the committee has been constituted including Abdul Hameed Sheikh Chief (provincial taxes) FBR (convener of the committee).

Other members of the committee included Noman Malik Chief-IT FBR; Pasand Khan Buledi, Chairperson Balochistan Revenue Authority; Abdul Hameed Memon Senior Member Sindh Revenue Board (SRB); Muhammad Iqbal Lakho Commissioner SRB; Abdur Raziq Khan Director Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Revenue Authority; Ali Mansoor Commissioner Audit Punjab Revenue Authority; an Additional Commissioner Punjab Revenue Authority, and other officials of the provincial revenue authorities.

In order to facilitate the taxpayers, promote ease of doing business and reduce compliance costs, the FBR has developed the “National Sales Tax Return”. This is a significant milestone towards automation, data integration and taxpayer’s facilitation, the FBR said.

National Sales Tax Return was developed after discussions and agreements, signed with the provincial revenue authorities and is therefore acceptable to them as well.

The feedback from other stakeholders, including taxpayers and tax practitioners, is also very favourable.

The system will help taxpayers to save time and effort, and to simplify tax filing procedures. It will save time and effort, and reduce compliance costs.

The National Sales Tax Return will minimize data entry, which will address the common issues of data and calculation errors. The system will automatically apportion input tax adjustment as well as tax payments across the sales tax authorities, eliminating the need for reconciliations and payment transfers.

Through this system, officers of all the revenue authorities will be able to make better informed decision regarding tax matters of the taxpayers.

It will enable tax collectors to improve revenue potential and tax compliance without audits.

One of the greatest benefits of this system is that it will encourage harmonization of tax procedures, definitions and principles between the federal government and the provinces, which will promote national unity and cohesion.

Sharing salient features of the National Sales Tax Return, the FBR said the taxpayers would only enter the sales data once and the system would act as a single repository for all domestic transactions and invoice management.

The system will automatically apportion input tax, prepare the return, and work out tax payable to each of the relevant authorities.

This will eliminate repeated tedious data entry, manual calculations, and errors.

The new system is based on the IRIS platform, which already has many built in functionalities.

For instance, notices, assessment orders, refunds, exemptions, and legal management system is already incorporated. The IRIS platform has proved to be very robust over time, and is being further improved.

The new system has linkages with POS transactions as well as Track and Trace.

The benefits of the National Sales Tax Return revealed that it simplifies tax filing procedures, helping taxpayers to save time and effort. Thus, it facilitates taxpayers, promotes ease of doing business and reduces compliance costs.

It minimises data entry, addressing the common issue of data and calculation errors.

The system will automatically apportion input tax adjustment as well as tax payments across the sales tax authorities, eliminating the need for reconciliations and payment transfers.

It is easily manageable, because managing one system is easier than 5.

Through this system, officers of all the revenue authorities will be able to make better informed decision regarding tax matters of the taxpayers.

It will enable tax collectors to improve revenue potential and tax compliance without audits.

It will encourage harmonisation of tax procedures, definitions and principles between the federal government and the provinces, the FBR added.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022