KARACHI: Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) on Wednesday said that Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has uploaded Single Sales Tax Return (SSTR) on IRIS pre-maturely without removing the bugs and without proper testing.
In a letter sent to the chairman FBR, the KTBA said that anomalies in the SSTR uploaded on IRIS Portal were acute and creating impediments in filing the correct return.
It said that at present, the IRIS Portal was not opening SSTR for the tax period of December 2021 where any previous sales tax return is pending and/ or not filed; adding that unclaimed input tax of goods and/ or services was also not available in the SSTR, which was against the provisions of law.
It also has no option to enter data of non-residents as IRIS portal only accepts NTN and/ or CNIC, KTBA said and added that option of exclusion from section 8b of the Act was currently not available to listed companies on IRIS based SSTR.
“Presently, the registered persons are unable to file NULL Return filing and further in some cases where NULL Return is filed, there is no option for print.
As the registered persons are unable to submit Annexure “C” due to various issues, they at present are unable to proceed further to file their SSTR”. It said that there was no excel template available for the purposes of Sales Tax Withholding (STWH) in the SSTR. Moreover, while entering data of purchase invoices made from un-registered persons, the system is calculating STWH liability on its own without checking if the registered person is withholding agent or not. Although this tab is editable (though mandatory), when a registered person who is not a withholding agent edits the tab and removes the pre-calculated amount, the entire record is not saved i.e. the purchase amount and/or quantity etc, KTBA added.
As per law, suppliers are not required to mention the CNIC and/ or NTN of the end-consumers if the invoice amount is below the threshold of Rs.100k. However, the SSTR at present is rejecting the proportionate input tax of every single amount where CNIC is not required.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022