KARACHI: President of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Shamim Ahmed Firpo has requested the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to extend last date for filing of income tax return up to December 31, 2016 as many filers will not be able to submit their returns due to slow processing and persisting errors.
The KCCI president requested the Board to extend time for the filing of tax returns and wealth statements and statements u/s 115(4) of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 till December 31, 2016.
President KCCI pointed out that large number of KCCI members, while seeking assistance, stated that they may not be able to file their returns by November 15, 2016 due to faulty online registration system, IRIS, which has been giving persistent errors while connecting to the web portal and even if it was functional, the web portal has remained dead slow since last several weeks.
He said that the taxpayers were not only unable to e-file the tax returns and wealth statements, but are also unable to generate the tax payment challans. Complications in the online system were not something new to taxpayers as every year, they have to face severe hardships which not only frustrates them but was also one of the major reason behind the trust deficit between the genuine taxpayers and FBR.
He said that FBR should seriously focus on enhancing the capacity of its online system which was not even capable enough to deal with a meager number of less than 1 percent registered taxpayers who filed their Income Tax Returns in 2015, out of a huge population of more than 200 million.
Therefore, for the larger interest of revenue collection and the business & industrial community, Shamim Firpo requested the FBR to extend the last date of filing income tax returns up to December 31, 2016 while considering the complications and errors in the online system.
