KARACHI: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has decided to send notices to the non-filer traders as the withholding tax on banking transactions could not help bring more people into tax net.
The country’s top revenue authority will start sending notices on the basis of information gathered from non-cash banking transactions after the deadline of the tax return filing in September.
The FBR introduced a Section 236P into the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 in the budget 201516 and under which 0.6 percent withholding tax on Rs50,000 worth of a banking transaction/day was imposed.
The rate was cut to 0.4 percent after a hue and cry from the trading community. The FBR also introduced voluntary tax compliance scheme but the tax authorities failed to attract the non-filers.
Initially, around one million traders were estimated to be registered under the scheme, but the FBR actually received less than 10,000 income tax returns.
