ISLAMABAD: As many as 210,437 unregistered persons responded to 216,601 notices of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), reflecting 6,164 pending cases under the Broadening of Tax Base (BTB) exercise.
This data has been shared by the FBR with the Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) during an own motion investigation of the FTO against technical gaps in respect of process flow and systemic errors in registration processes of the FBR.
While investigating the said complaints, it transpired that in many cases Iris system failed to respond to queries of the taxpayers.
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The FTO has directed the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to deploy dedicated team of professionals to continuously monitor flow of traffic on the registration system to avoid any systemic errors and chokes.
According to the recommendations of the FTO office on the issue of Broadening of Tax Base (BTB), the FBR should also develop and issue an SOP specifying ways and means to give timely response to queries of the aggrieved taxpayers and reasonable timeline for each response be fixed for clarity.
The FBR should also upgrade online system of filing of return and registration should be undertaken periodically for providing state of art online facilities to the taxpayers, the FTO added.
The FBR responded that the BTB registration system has been revamped and all such issues have been resolved and no further complaint about this issue has been received. They further stated that the said BTB registration process was implemented on 26th December, 2022 and revamped solution was deployed on production on 26th May, 2023.
Deployment of the revamped version of BTB registration in Iris has been put in place after intervention in the mailer from the FTO as the complaints in this regard were forwarded to the respondent department in the month of January, 2023.
The FTO Secretariat took up the matter with the FBR following surfacing of multiple complaints on systemic gaps and errors, the respondent reviewed the online registration system and deployed a new and revamped system on May 26, 2023 which resolved the visible issues.
Notwithstanding, the system needs further improvement to facilitate the taxpayers particularly when the system gets choked due to high volume of transaction at the time of filing of tax returns. In this regard, the following recommendations are made.
The foregoing paras amply prove that previous design of the online registration system in Iris for purposes of Broadening of Tax Base (BTB) was flawed in the first place as it did not provide smooth sailing through the system to those persons who wanted to register themselves as new taxpayers.
It also created hurdles in the way of those who were not liable to be registered u/s 181 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001.They were denied excess to the registration form and their queries were not responded at all, the FTO added.
