FBR detects sales tax scam

RECORDER REPORT

LAHORE: Intelligence and Investigation, Inland Revenue (II&IR) of Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has detected a sales tax scam causing loss of over Rs 66 million to the national exchequer. The scam involved invoices worth more than Rs 400 million.

FBR sources said that the arrested person, Faisal Nisar s/o Nisar Ahmed was running M/s Fasial Enterprises as Chief Executive Officer. He was doing paper industry related business and issued fake invoices to four different beneficiaries worth over Rs 400 million, they said. The four beneficiaries are likely to be arrested for interrogation in near future, they sources claimed.  The Regional Taxpayer Unit (RTO) Lahore has arrested a tax evader and special judge custom courts Amjad Pervaiz on Friday granted him physical remand for six days and handed over him to the RTO Lahore for interrogation. A senior official said that II&IR was closely monitoring the flying invoices cases of sales tax.

He said that the majority of tax evasion cases of billion of rupees were so far found in flying invoices. He said that sales tax compliance was being ruined by these sales tax evaders with the connivance of the customs officials. He said rackets of customs officials and these fake invoices businessmen were operational across the country, mainly in Lahore and Karachi.

In close monitoring of flying invoices, the II&IR has also made another breakthrough and detected a company based in Lahore showing import of Rs 17 billion in one month. The company deposited Rs 3 billion sales tax to the FBR through collectorate of customs Karachi. However, when intelligence unit investigated the company's sales tax returns, these could not be verified while the owner of the company also did not file income tax returns.

Following the detection of the fake import and sales tax filing by the party, the case was referred to the Director Investigation RTU Lahore to block the person's sales tax invoices and start investigation.

The FBR official said the capacity of issuing flying invoices of worth Rs 17 billion would be a big scam by a single party and timely detection of it counter the issuance of flying invoices from this party.

He said that the II&IR was also investigating the old sales tax cases which were dubious. However, recovery of the evaded tax money from those was difficult task as compared to deal with the future attempts of flying invoices and recovery of taxes from ongoing financial year.