LAHORE: Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) Dr Asif Mahmood Jah has directed the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to streamline the IT process to ensure timely assignment of newly-registered cases to their proper jurisdiction. He said that pendency of cases due to non-assigning of the same is tantamount to maladministration.
The FTO has pointed out that more than 65000 cases were unassigned and lying in Corporate Tax Office (CTO) portal in the wake of split of one regional tax office (RTO) into three RTOs.
He has also taken strong exception to the discrepancies in the Pakistan Revenue Automation Ltd. (PRAL) system, which had automatically entered all new registered cases in CTO without differentiating the dead cases with the live ones.
Accordingly, it was becoming a lengthy process for the concerned tax authorities to carry out verifications and transfer to relevant jurisdictions from time to time.
The FTO has sought from the FBR to develop and enforce an efficient system for resolution of jurisdictional issues among various field formations.
It may be noted that the FBR has also failed to fix the anomalies in the recently-introduced export facilitation scheme (EFS) where all the export and related schemes have been clubbed with to facilitate exporters.
However, the module developed by PRAL lacks the option of reverting back the cases wrongly forwarded to input output co-efficient organization (IOCO), causing uncalled for hassle to the export-oriented manufacturing units.
According to the IOCO sources, some 2200 old cases were referred to them. On inquiry, when the mistake was pointed out by the concerned staff, the IOCO management found itself into a troublesome situation as the EFS module was missing the facility of reverting back.
Accordingly, the issue went up to the level of member customs when the exporters’ community agitated before her and objected to the exercise of survey if their manufacturing units on the basis of old cases.
The sources said the efficiency of PRAL has been under spotlight since day one but it comes up with a new technical glitch after overcoming the previous one. They said the software developed for various functions are not up to the mark, causing undue delay in smooth functioning of the tax machinery on the one hand and hassle for the taxpayers on the other.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023