Islamabad: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has geared up process for the finalisation of budgetary proposals for upcoming budget of fiscal year 2015-16 as the Customs and Inland Revenue wings have started collection of data and compilation reports in this regard.
The main thrust of the FBR will be on elimination of tax exemptions, a source at the FBR told Customs Today on Wednesday, adding that FBR Chairman Tariq Bajwa has assigned the task to Chief Tax Policy Tariq Masood and Nisar Muhammad Khan (Customs) to establish a liaison in this regard.
Last year, the focus of the FBR’s budgetary proposals was to increase revenue collection and a target of Rs 2810 billion was fixed. New measures and new steps were introduced to collect Rs 190 billion revenue.
Measures comprised proposals and changes including taxing vehicles, levying tax on accounting income of corporate sector, different tax rates for filer and non-filer of tax returns and procedural changes in audit cases were proposed by the FBR and were incorporated in the budget.
FBR was concerned over the non responsive attitude of the taxpayers towards the proposal of different tax rates to fillers and non fillers of tax returns, because figures of fillers had not increased and even not touched the last year’s figure.
FBR is in a mess and perplexed situation, why the taxpayers did not pay due attention towards the given incentives and benefits for tax return fillers in the clause of different tax rates for fillers and non fillers of tax returns despite announcement of lucrative incentives for taxpayers for filling tax returns.
The FBR introduced such measures that made business very difficult in the form of higher rates of taxes on un-registered sales and supplies to force them to operate in the documented regime or leave the business.
FBR proposed the government to increase the cost of non-active taxpayers as compared to active/registered taxpayers.
However, for the upcoming budgetary proposals, FBR’s focus is on elimination of tax exemptions as FBR eyes on approximate revenue of Rs 100 billion through tax exemptions; sales and income tax exemptions. However, three proposals will be considered; elimination of tax exemptions, reducing the tax exemptions and keeping the tax exemptions intact.
In this regard, Nisar Muhammad Khan will head the committee which will bifurcate between the tax exemptions for total elimination, reduction of percentage of tax exemptions and keeping the exemptions intact. Similarly, Customs Wing will give detailed presentation on this issue to FBR Chairman and other concerned officials on tomorrow (Friday). The second presentation will be given by the Inland Revenue Wing during the next week.
