President of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) Shamim Ahmed Firpo has urged the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to extend last date for filing of income tax return up to December 31, 2016 as many filers will not be able to submit their returns due to slow processing and persisting errors. He requested the FBR to allow filing of tax returns, wealth statements and statements under section 115 (4) of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 till December 31, 2016.
President KCCI pointed out that large number of KCCI members had sought assistance complaining that they might not be able to file their returns by November 15, 2016 due to faulty online registration system, IRIS, which had been giving persistent errors while connecting to the web portal and even if it was functional, the web portal remained dead slow for several weeks. He said that the taxpayers were not only unable to e-file the tax returns and wealth statements, but are also unable to generate the tax payment challans.
He said that complications in the online system were not new to the taxpayers as every year they had to face severe hardships, which not only frustrated them but also remained one of the major reasons behind the trust-deficit between the genuine taxpayers and the FBR hence the FBR should seriously focus on enhancing the capacity of its online system which was not even capable enough to deal with a meager number of less than 1% registered taxpayers who filed their Income Tax Returns in 2015. Therefore, in the larger interest of revenue collection and the business and industrial community, Shamim Firpo requested the FBR for extension in the deadline.