ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is planning to exempt mobile phone subscribers, who do not fall under the tax net, from payment of withholding tax (WHT).
The FBR officials disclosed this while briefing Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication about the federal budget for 2017-18. For this purpose, the revenue authority would introduce legislation in Financial Bill 2017. The FBR has been collecting billions of rupee WHT mobile phone subscribers.
During the meeting, the committee members highlighted that there was no mechanism to analyse the data of taxes collected by telecom companies. The FBR IT officials briefed the committee that such system had already been established by PRAL (Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited) which allowed telecom companies to upload withholding data file on agreed format on both FTP and HTTP-based web service. But the system is currently facing some technical issues for uploading bulk data on the servers.
