ISLAMABAD: The Minister of State for Revenues Hammad Azhar said that the government have developed IT solution to overcome smuggled phone with a gigantic estimate of Rs110 billion the said collection could be doubled than many sectors such as sugar and others.
The minister was addressing in an event organized by SDPI, he termed tax collection agency as detrimental for collecting due taxes and said that now the government planned to move ahead with national tax agency instead of asking the taxpayers to file different taxes at federal and provincial levels separately.
He said that the informal sector was the major problem and even chains of some formal sectors such as sugar, steel, plastic and others broke at certain stage so the FBR could not fully collect the due taxes.
The minister said that the government will grant autonomy to the FBR as part of long term agenda after placing ongoing reforms for separating policy from administration. We are going to use technology, integration of data from different avenues including 30 government agencies, separating tax policy from administration for improving administration as tax policy measures had already exhausted through different measures in the past,”.
Contrary to the claim of Minister for Finance Asad Umar for overcoming crisis, Minister of State for Revenues argued in his address that Pakistan’s economy was in crisis mode and made a comparison between 2013 and 2018 and stated that the foreign currency reserves were doubled than current account deficit (CAD) in 2013 but now the CAD was doubled than foreign currency reserves. Talking about the IMF, he said that irrespective of political cost the government would undertake all those steps which would be in the interest of the country. “We will ensure transparency into Ministry of Finance and FBR instead of keeping things secretive,” he added.
