ISLAMABAD: Chairman FBR Tariq Bajwa would convene Board in Council meeting on Friday (tomorrow) to approve audit plan for selection of taxpayers of income tax and sales tax.
Through the audit plan, FBR has planned to fetch Rs 50 to Rs 60 billion into the national kitty during the current fiscal year. The efforts have been made to avoid plunging into legal battle as in the past all audit plans approved by the tax machinery were landed into courts on the basis of different grounds. “This time we have concentrated a lot to avoid eruption of any such controversy,” said the official sources.
Under the audit plan, FBR has decided to conduct 10 percent audit out of total filers and random selection will be made to move ahead in this regard.
“We will grant exemption to certain sectors such as salaried taxpayers will not be selected for the upcoming audit exercise,” said one FBR Member and added that where final tax liability was charged, FBR would not select such cases for holding audit.
Without deterrence of audit, it was simply impossible for achieving desired tax collection target of Rs 2475 billion in the current fiscal year. FBR has so far collected Rs 290.5 billion in first two months and first few days of September 2013.
To ensure effectiveness of the audit plan, FBR also decided to exclude certain areas from audit exercise such as salaried class — all those sectors where final tax liability is charged as audit of these sectors would not impact revenue side positively. So we decided to drop these sectors consciously in order to avoid wastage of time.
FBR has also placed Tax Audit Management System (TAMS) that enabled tax authorities to avoid misuse of any notice.
FBR was facing challenging situation to enforce audit plan in an effective manner from last several years because every time it was challenged into different courts on the basis of certain legal lacunas in the plan.
