Filing new ST/FE return form: taxpayers facing serious problems

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has uploaded new sales tax and federal excise return form on the FBR Web-Portal, but the taxpayers are facing serious technical and practical problems in filing of returns. Tax experts told Business Recorder here on Friday that the taxpayers are facing problems in filling of new sales tax and federal excise return forms.
The problems have been identified after practically feeding the data in the new return form by the registered persons. For instance, in case a single Goods Declaration (GD) contains different rates of sales tax, the system only allow to put one rate of tax and there is no provision for filling the other rate of tax against the same bill of entry.
The new sales tax return form is unable to accept the GD where there is a multiple rate of sales tax has to be fed in the system. "Duplicate Entries are not accepting in Import Annexure "B" of the return. If a GD has multiple rate 16 percent and 0 percent the system only takes the entry at once and there is no provision for reporting other entry", they said.
Some experts have also pointed out ambiguities in the new sales tax and federal excise return form. For example, the link for Annexure "H" & "P" are not operative. The Annex-H is related to the stock statement to be filed by the registered person and Annex-P is related to the breakup of services provided to be completed by the service provider as part of the return form.
The details for each and every sale and purchase invoice to unregistered taxpayers causing extraordinary data feeding workload. It is also interesting that system requires invoice number for each entry, whereas, in case of purchase from unregistered sector no invoice is available hence no question for invoice number arises resultantly the taxpayer could not proceed further. This means that the FBR has demanded particulars of entire undocumented transactions which at this point is not possible in the absence of legal bar on the taxpayers.
Experts further said that the data files are not attached. In case the taxpayer wanted to attach the data, the attachment facility is not available under the new return form. This has been tried by certain taxpayers, who have complaint about non-attachment facility in the return form. The Column No 23 meant for Sec 8B of the Sales Tax Act has no provision for exclusion for persons having more than 50 percent exports sales despite the fact the same is available in the relevant notification. The problems are also arising in reporting of sales tax withholding amount, experts added.