KARACHI: Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is likely to extend the last date for filing income tax returns for salaried and business individuals beyond October 31, 2019.
The FBR may extend the date on the request of tax bars and huge number of people who failed to comply with mandatory requirement. Through Finance Act, 2019 the law was amended and last date for filing annual income tax return for salaried person was set September 30 from August 31.
Therefore, taxpayers such as salaried persons, business individuals, Association of Persons, taxpayers falling in final tax regime and companies having special tax year are required to file their income tax returns for tax year 2019 by September 30, 2019.
The FBR already extended the last date for filing Tax Year 2019 income tax return up to October 31, 2019 from September 30, 2019. FBR chairman Syed Shabbar Zaidi recently disclosed that around 918,027 income tax returns were filed by 9:00PM on October 25, 2019.
The total income tax returns for tax year 2018 reached to 2.65 million. It means that 1.73 million more taxpayers required to file their returns under the income tax laws for the tax year 2019.
Therefore, it was almost impossible for FBR web portal to accept such huge number of returns in remaining six days.
Recently, Pakistan Tax Bar Association (PTBA) in a letter to FBR chairman pointed out that draft return 2019 for individuals, salaried individuals and AOPs was uploaded on August 23, 2019 through SRO 951 and final return 2019 was uploaded on IRIS on September 02, 2019 through SRO 979 of 2019, which shows lapse of statutory period of two months (62 days) and all burden shifts on FBR.
It further stated that the manual return of income form for tax year 2019 was issued on September 27, 2019 through SRO 1160 of 2019, so the small volume taxpayers could file their returns of income for the year 2019 within time.
The PTBA said that as per law and statutory time period for filing of income tax return is 90 days under Section 118 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 read with Rule 34 of Income Tax Rules, 2002 while on the contrary only 48 days have been give here so far between September 02 and October 31, 2019 for online filing and only 31 days available for manual filing.
The FBR allowed income tax return filing for tax year 2018 up to August 09, 2019 means 11 months time was given. The PTBA said that now only one month has been given for tax year 2019, which clearly shows the floating injustice with the taxpayers.
