To get extra revenue: FBR purposely declaring ST registrations as ‘inactive’: experts
Tax experts accuse the FBR of deliberately making sales tax registrations inactive to coerce businesses into paying extra sales tax, citing maladministration and lack of accountability.
- FBR's alleged practice of declaring sales tax registrations inactive.
- A company's sales tax return blocked due to a technical anomaly.
- FBR's alleged failure to resolve taxpayer issues despite repeated attempts.
ISLAMABAD: Tax experts have alleged that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is deliberately declaring the sales tax registrations as inactive to generate additional revenue through the application of “extra sales tax.”
Serious allegations of maladministration, administrative excess, and willful neglect have been levelled by the tax advisers.
Waheed Shahzad Butt, who is pursuing this case, accused that the FBR officials have been unlawfully blocking the filing of sales tax returns as a mechanism to coerce inflated tax payments (Extra Sales Tax), raising urgent questions about institutional accountability and the rule of law within Pakistan’s apex revenue authority.
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According to the details, a company filed its monthly sales tax return for December 2025 provisionally through the FBR web portal. Upon submission, the return was automatically locked by the FBR system owing to a negative figure appearing in Annexure H-1, a technical anomaly arising from an incomplete annexure submission at the time of provisional filing.
The resolution of such a system-generated lock requires the administrative intervention of competent FBR officials, an action that, the taxpayer contends, was repeatedly sought but never delivered.
The failure to unlock the December 2025 return triggered a cascading effect, the returns for January 2026 onward also remained pending. Consequently, the FBR system automatically rendered the company’s sales tax registration “Inactive”, a status that carries serious commercial and legal consequences for any registered business operating in Pakistan’s formal economy, he maintained.
Waheed added that a formal written application was addressed to the Secretary (ST-Operations). This was followed by multiple personal visits to FBR headquarters, including documented visits. On each occasion, relevant officials were met in person. On each occasion, no corrective action was taken and no written response was issued.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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