KARACHI: Regional Tax Office (RTO) –II Karachi to launch drive from next week in order to facilitate people to file their annual income tax returns.
FBR teams will set up camp offices at large corporate and government offices besides visiting markets and shopping plazas to encourage salary and business individuals to file their returns, said Badaruddin Ahmed Qureshi, Chief Commissioner, Inland Revenue, RTO-II, Karachi at a press conference on Friday.
The chief commissioner said that the purpose of the facilitation drive was to achieve 5 million income tax return filers during next few years. “The FBR has already received over 2.1 million income tax returns for tax year 2018,” the chief commissioner said.
He further added that the last date for filing income tax returns for tax year 2018 had been extended up to August 02, 2019.
He said that in order to achieve five million-milestone the FBR launched several measures to encourage / force persons having taxable income to file their returns.
The chief commissioner said that in first phase the RTO Karachi would ask large corporate entities and provincial departments to assure return filing by their employees having taxable income.
The tax office identified that employees of large organizations such as Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), National Bank of Pakistan (NBP), Pakistan Railways (PR) had taxable income but were not filing their income tax returns.
He said that the RTO-II Karachi would set up camp offices at various organizations for the enforcement of return filing. The camp offices would be set up at PIA, NBP, SSGC, Police, KMC, Water Board, Sindh Building Control Authority etc.
The chief commissioner said that the office had received details of doctors. He said that Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) had 68,000 registered doctors out of which only 6,500 were filing annual income tax returns.
The chief commissioner said that it would be difficult to conceal transactions in future as FBR with the help of other regulators had established electronic system for information sharing.
The chief commissioner said that the FBR was facing enforcement problems due to human resource capacity but in order to ensure compliance a NGO was being engaged for the task of return filing.
He said that the tax office had get volunteers from the NGO would file returns of those who did not want to pay fee of lawyers.
A training session for those volunteers had been held recently at the tax office.
