FTO takes notice of tax credited to wrong person’s record

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) has taken serious notice of an unusual case in which tax collected through an electricity connection was being credited against the CNIC/tax record of a person who was not the actual consumer of the electricity. More significantly, the complainant himself identified the actual consumer to whom the electricity connection belonged.

The matter raises a serious possibility that the arrangement may not be a simple case of erroneous data entry, but could represent a carefully devised mechanism whereby tax attributable to an actual electricity consumer is deposited against the record of an unrelated person, thereby enabling the actual consumer to remain outside the tax trail maintained by the tax authorities.

The FTO has directed the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to examine the matter comprehensively and determine how the CNIC of an unrelated person came to be associated with the electricity connection and whether the arrangement resulted in tax being incorrectly attributed to that person while the actual consumer escaped corresponding reflection in the tax record.

The Ombudsman has observed that such a mechanism, if established to be deliberate, could have implications beyond the individual complaint. It may indicate a novel method of defeating the tax authorities’ data-matching and monitoring mechanisms by shifting the tax trail of one consumer to the CNIC of another person.

The FBR has accordingly been asked to verify the complete record of the electricity connection, identify the person who actually consumed the electricity, reconcile the tax collected with the corresponding taxpayer record, and examine whether any collusion, manipulation or deliberate misuse of the system was involved.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026