ISLAMABAD: In bid to bring real estate industry into tax net, the government has decided to document the sector, said Adviser to the Prime Minister on Revenue Haroon Akhtar.
Haroon Akhtar said that the government has held meeting with representatives of real estate associations in cordial atmosphere. “We hope the DC value mechanism for property prices evaluation would be replaced with other workable modalities,” Akhtar said.
He said the associations had three major concerns which were discussed. “Firstly they are not ready to accept an evaluator even if it is a third party evaluator and to come under its purview. Their second concern was if converted from DC rate to fair market value it may cause harmful effects for business community,” he added. “The third issue was if rate is raised from DC rate then what would be status of past transactions made before July 1st.”
Haroon said that consensus was developed in the meeting to form a 13 member committee from real estate association to evaluate fair market price and DC rate and Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) would work from the government side on evaluation.
The said committee and FBR are given deadline of Wednesday to complete their work, he added. The evaluation of both the sides would be compared and if major difference was found it would be settled with consensus according to fair market value, he added.
Akhtar said the government was making sincere efforts to bring reforms in this sector as he hoped that price evaluation matter would be sorted out by the end of this month as per deadline given by the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Muhammad Ishaq Dar.
The adviser said that people were investing in the sector and it was not about just buying and selling of plots rather it was a complete sector of housing development as 32 other industries also associated to this business. He said, “We had been doing the practice for three years to convert the black money into white through documentation of industrial sector and it cannot be done overnight.”
Akhtar said to resolve the matter of transactions made before July 1st this year there is a suggestion to apply a fix rate and it would be considered by the government. He said many incentives had been given by the government to industrial sector for an overall progress in the country.
