ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) President Atif Ikram Sheikh has lauded the current team of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) for adopting a comparative better and cordial attitude towards the taxpayers.
He also termed this friendly attitude main reason for the addition of thousands of new taxpayers in the tax net.
In a exclusive interview with Customs Today, Sheikh, a young president of the ICCI, said that private sector had often not been taken on board on the issue of broadening of tax base (BTB) in the past, but the current government was making almost every decision in full consultation with the private sector.
He further said that the FBR should give friendly tax proposals for the upcoming budget for the fiscal year 2016-17 to persuade potential taxpayers to come into the tax net as well as to promote the tax culture in the country.
Responding to a question about fruits of voluntary tax compliance scheme (VTCS), he said that results of the VTCS were not up the expectations of both the finance ministry as well as FBR and main reason for this state of affair was that scheme was launched without proper education of the masses.
Prior to launching of this scheme, he said that government should have run a mass awareness drive to highlight the benefits of paying taxes as well as future impacts of inclusion of people in the tax net.
Similarly, Sheikh said that government should have addressed almost all the reservations of the traders and business community on the VTCS and accepted their demands to lure them to the tax net once and later collect taxes from them forever on permanent basis. However, time is not over till now, as government may re-launch the VTCS after introducing little bit amendments in to get better results for the future.
To another question about the ongoing process of meetings for the preparation of federal budget, Sheikh said that being ICCI president, he was being taken totally onboard on the tax related budgetary proposals both by the FBR and finance ministry and he was frequently invited to such consultative meetings. This is why, we expect that upcoming budget will be business friendly.
He said that government should take all necessary measures to convert the existing import oriented monetary and fiscal policies into the export oriented ones. It is imperative just because of the fact that no country may progress without increasing exports as well as with a huge trade deficit. At present, our country also faces such a huge trade deficit and it just because of the fact that our consecutive regimes in the past had kept the industrialization of the country ignored.
The main hurdle in the promotion of exports is the non payment of sales tax refunds and income tax rebates to the exporters because the blockage of huge sums of sales tax refunds make the traders devoid of their working capital” he added suggesting that government should focus on early payments of the sales tax refunds to the exporters and traders to enable them to carry on with their export related activities as well as to earn more and more foreign exchange reserves by selling their products abroad.
Although finance minister Ishaq Dar, he said that had ensured traders and business community representatives for making early payments of blocked sales tax and income tax refunds, yet this process had not kicked off and this state of affairs was creating much disappointment among the concerned quarters.
Expressing concerns over the reducing exports, he observed that it was tragic that commercial counsellors were not present in almost all the Pakistani high commissions and embassies and absence of commercial counsellors was resulting in non promotion of our products abroad. Therefore, I have decided to write to ministry of commerce to appoint commercial counsellors abroad as early as possible.
To another question, he said that in a recent meeting, prime minister Nawaz Sharif assured to increase the tenure of office bearers of both the FPCCI and chambers of commerce and Industries from one year to two consecutive years. Once this decision is implemented, the elected bodies of chambers will be able to perform in a better and improved way because any office bearer gets too short time to serve.
Commenting on his performance in coming up to the expectations of the ICCI members he said that he made all possible efforts to come up the expectations of the members of the chamber in last six months. Therefore, level of satisfaction of the members on his services is also almost 100% while he personally ranks him as 80% successful in resolving the issues brought into his consideration by be members.
