ISLAMABAD: The Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Revenue, Tariq Pasha, has started assigning targets to the field formations for registering the new taxpayers and bringing high net worth individuals into the documented regime.
In this connection, Pasha, Wednesday, visited the Regional Tax Office (RTO), Islamabad and RTO Rawalpindi to have an update on the national documentation drive of the FBR.
During the visit, the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Revenue assigned targets to the RTO Islamabad and RTO Rawalpindi for the purpose of broadening the tax base.
The Chief Commissioners of Islamabad and RTO Rawalpindi gave a detailed presentation to Pasha on the progress made on account of broadening the tax base.
Recently, the Directorate General of Broadening of Tax Base and Directorate General of Digital Invoicing and Analysis have been made functional to expand the tax base.
The FBR has revived the Directorate General of Broadening the Tax-Base Unit (BTB) to register potential taxpayers and high net worth individuals with the help of data and specialised zones.
In the first phase, BTB Zones would be linked with the data analysis team in the FBR Headquarters. The target would be registration of only potential taxpayers, sources said.
Under section 230D of the Income Tax Ordinance, the Directorate General of Broadening of Tax Base shall consist of a director-general and as many directors, additional directors, deputy directors, assistant directors and such other officers as the board may need, by notification in the official Gazette. The board may, by notification in the official Gazette, specify the functions, jurisdiction and powers of the Directorate-General of Broadening of Tax Base, it added.
The FBR has not uploaded 3.5 million National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) profiles of non-filers on the web portal specifically framed for the non-filers of the income tax. The idea was to launch a new web portal for millions of non-filers to have an updated data of financial transactions of citizens with tax profiling by the Nadra.
Recently, through In-House Analysis, FTO Secretariat has also identified that though the FBR and its dozens of field formations maintain an organised web portal, rich data centre, exhaustive databases, elaborate and comprehensive operational software and houses a full-fledged and home-grown IT support system, i.e., the Pakistan Automation (Pvt) Ltd (Pral), yet neither the FBR HQs nor its any single field formation maintains any IT-based tracking system, archiving various valuable initiatives and ventures made by different FBR’s organizations, officers, teams or specially created cells from time to time; any exhaustive, foolproof and IT-enabled handing over module (from predecessors to successors) for such initiatives; any institutionalized internal follow up system, or any internal evaluation mechanism to gauge whether the goals envisaged under the FBR’s flagship ventures have been logically pursued and achieved.
Therefore, it was reasonably assumed that in most of the cases, the good job done is wasted, diluted or compromised with the transfer of individuals, dissolution of units/ cells and takeover by new managers, the FTO added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023