ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue has published an incomplete tax directory of the parliamentarians, contains names of only 1,072 filers of income tax returns out of total 1,172 parliamentarians, having National Tax Numbers (NTNs).
The names of members of National Assembly, Senate and Provincial assembles who did not have filed returns have not been included in the tax directory.
The tax directory contained two separate columns of ‘filers and no-filers’, but both the columns were deleted at the last moment. The columns were separately mentioned to identify the non-filers. The purpose of publishing the tax directory was to make public the names of the non-filers. Thus, an incomplete tax directory has been published by the government, sources added.
On the other hand, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that all the parliamentarians had obtained NTNs and of total 1,172 parliamentarians, 1,072 had filed their income tax returns for the tax year ended June 30, 2013 and for the remaining parliamentarians, due process was being undertaken. On January 6, 2014, during his speech in the Senate, Dar had announced that the government will publish a tax directory of members of parliament and provincial assemblies by 15.02.2014, in exercise of powers conferred under sub-section (6) of section 216 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001.
It is to be noted that the directory has been tabulated from the returns filed manually and electronically (till midnight February 14, 2014). Manually filed returns have been entered into the system.
