ISLAMABAD: Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has started withholding income tax audit of telcos in order to professionally examine, analyze and verify the veracity of the income tax.
FBR has developed software which will collect data from all 4 telecom operators. Firstly, Mobile companies were initially reluctant to share data with anyone prior to Customers privacy but Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) stepped in and solved the issue. Now the operators are bound to share the data with FBR with their recently developed software.
Huge customer base and confidentiality was the reasons but the matter has been resolved, an official of FBR said. He said, Telenor, Ufone and Mobilink have uploaded their income tax data for the month of July, August and September 2017, whereas the fourth telco Zong is facing number of technical issues in uploading the required data on PRAL-utility portal which are in the process of being resolved by them.
Telenor Pakistan (Private) Limited has provided the revised data to the Federal Board of Revenue. The FBR has started the audit of withholding tax on the basis of revised data provided by the M/S Telenor Pakistan.
In view of massive volume of the number of transactions, the exercise is expected to be completed in 8 to 10 weeks time. Federal Board of revenue has decided that the withholding tax audit of other telecom companies would also be carried out after taking into account the outcome and inference drawn from M/s Telenor Pakistan (Pvt) Limited.
The development of the new software is a positive step by FBR as they will now be accurately collect taxes from all telecom companies. The data will be collected on biweekly basis from the companies.
Federal Board of Revenue have hired professional auditors to examine the record of the telecom companies.
