KARACHI: The Sindh government has failed to impose levy on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supplies and their return from Afghanistan to Karachi ports as the roads infrastructure of the province incurred losses worth billions of rupees, it is learnt.
The Sindh’s Excise and Taxation Department is responsible for collecting the levy on the movement of goods entering the province from outside the country through road, air or sea routes.
However, the NATO supplies are not being covered under the cited head despite the fact that movements of heavy containers and trawlers have caused serious damages to the highways of Sindh from Karachi to Jacobabad.
Interestingly, when Islamabad had signed Pak-Afghan Transit Trade Agreement, the Sindh government imposed a levy on the goods consignment for developing province’s highways. However, the Sindh was restrained by the federal authorities not to interfere into the matter and kept the excise and taxation authorities away from it, sources confided to Customs Today.
The consignment of the NATO supplies ‘what the sources claimed’ was illegally exempted by the federal government due to which the province infrastructure especially the road networks were badly damaged.
According to rules of the Sindh government, the infrastructure cess is collected at 0.5 percent of the total consignment on the movement of goods entering the province from outside the country through air or sea.
However, after the start of NATO supplies few years back, the federal government had restrained the provincial authorities of both the Sindh and Balochistan from collecting any kind of levies for infrastructure.
Moreover, sources in the newly established Sindh Revenue Board also said that the Sindh government was legal to collect the infrastructure cess at 0.5 percent C&F value of a consignment on the movement of goods entering the province. However, as far as the NATO supplies are concerned, no provincial authority was ready to raise the issue with federal authorities.
A senior official of the Excise and Taxation Department told Customs Today that it was Sindh’s fundamental right to collect infrastructure cess on NATO supplies however it was barred from doing so under federal pressure. The chief minister has been apprised about the issue and it was hoped that he would talk to federal authorities for the Sindh’s share from NATO supplies route.
