Haji Fazal Kadir Khan Sherani, President of Federation of Pakistan Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FPCCI) and Mr. Zakaria Usman, Chairman of the FPCCI Standing Committee on Coordination with the FBR, have urged Ali Arshad Hakeem, Chairman of Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to immediately issue instructions to the RTO –II Karachi to do away with the audit of returns, selected either manually by the audit officers or through computer balloting based on joint parametric selection criteria under the Income Tax, Sales Tax and Federal Excise laws, as it is clearly against the audit policy of the Board.
They elaborated that FBR as per the law, is authorized to select cases for audit only through parametric computer random balloting based on either Income Tax, Sales Tax or Federal Excise laws as such the cases selected through computer balloting based on joint parameters under the Income Tax, Sales Tax and Federal Excise Laws have been declared illegal by the Lahore High Court. Moreover, they disclosed that the FBR in its earlier letter communicated to all tax officials had given them clear instructions that only the tax payers selected through parametric computer random balloting would be audited. The FPCCI President and Chairman referring to the reports that the tax officials had been assigned new tax target for recovery through audit lamented, “Assigning such targets specifically to Karachi-Based tax officials is discriminatory in nature and ultra-vires of the constitutions.” “Rather than simply targeting Karachi and other parts of Sindh, all Pakistan should be brought within the scope of such exercise”, they urged.
Mr. Sherani also showed concern on the statement given by the Finance Minister in Senate that the number of Income Tax filers had been drastically reduced to 1.6 million in 2009 and only 810,000 tax payers have filed their returns in 2011-2012. He said that the FPCCI realized the importance of broadening of tax base and as such instead of squeezing existing tax payers the new potential tax payer should be brought in to tax net by suitable reduction in the tax rates, which are exorbitant in Pakistan as compared to other countries in the region.
FPCCI has no reason to object regarding audit. FBR can decide on their own which ever method is more effective from their point of view.
The fact that they are skirmish on regards of the auditing procedures means they are definitely hiding something from the government. A full audit with a supreme court order should be considered so as not to impede anything.
It must be taken to some wider sense because there are some important values which will be going to eliminate by this simple decision, but I'm quite sure that respective authorities will do something to save this problem.
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