ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) collected Rs 831.4 billion withholding tax (WHT) during fiscal year 2015-16 against Rs 691.2 billion in the same period of last fiscal year, showing a growth of 20.3 percent.
According to the FBR’s quarterly review, the highest contributor in withholding tax is contracts (26.5%) followed by imports (21.6%) and salaries (11.1%). The share of only two items ie contract and imports is around 48% and the addition of salary item raises the share of these three items to nearly 60% in total withholding taxes, showing high reliance on few items.
The WHT contributes around 68 per cent to the collection of direct taxes. The nine major components of withholding taxes that contributed around 85% to total WHT collection are: contracts, imports, salaries, telephone, exports, bank interest/securities, cash withdrawals, dividends and electricity. As far as growth is concerned, collection from dividends grew by 43%, followed by contracts (24.5%), cash withdrawals (23%), imports (22%) and salaries (16.1%).
Meanwhile, the sales tax collection during 2015-16 was around Rs 1,324 billion against Rs 1,088 billion in the corresponding period of last year. The overall sales tax collection grew by 21.7% and around Rs 236 billion additional amount has been collected during 2015-16 as compared to the collection of previous year. The collection of sales tax domestic grew by 19.7%, whereas, sales tax imports increased by 23.6%.
The overall revenue target was achieved met to the extent of 107.6%, around Rs 7 billion higher than the assigned target of Rs 1,230.3 billion for FY 2015-16. Within sales tax, the share of sales tax imports is around 52% and that of sales tax domestic is around 48% during 2015-16. During last two years, the composition has slightly changed as the share of STM has gone up from 50.8% to 51.6% and share of sales tax domestic (STD) has gone down from 49.2% to 48.4%.
