Commercial consumers: power utilities may be asked to obtain NTNs

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is planning to make it mandatory for all power utilities to obtain National Tax Numbers (NTNs) from all the commercial consumers. According to sources, the revenue body is contemplating making it obligatory for Wapda, KESC and other power distribution companies to acquire NTNs from commercial consumers.
They said the move was aimed at monitoring the deductions made by power distribution companies on account of withholding tax. The sources said the board has already bound telecom sector to obtain NTNs from all the subscribers. They said the FBR feels that if the commercial consumers are inducted into the taxation mechanism, the revenue collection would increase manifold. However, some officials in the tax department dismissed the said proposal, saying that this exercise would lead to choking the centralised registration system as the registration process, which was supposed to be done in hours, will take months because of the applications galore.
Moreover, this exercise could only yield fruits, if the board decentralizes its registration process, which would also help reduce the backlog of NTN applications. They said in the past, the local tax offices processed the NTN applications within days through Pral counters but now the same was being done through centralised system.