FBR to digitalise tax collection system

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has announced that it will replace the existing manual tax collection system with a well-equipped, automated and digital system in a year or two to detect tax evasion and avoidance, and end alleged culture of corruption and harassment of taxpayers.

“Digitalisation of the tax collection system is being done under aggressive reforms at the FBR,” said FBR Chairman Dr Jahanzeb Khan while addressing the business community at the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) on Saturday.

“We are actively working on reforms these days. We are hopeful to present the digital tax collection system by next year and implement it in one to two years,” he said.
He pointed out that the FBR had already gathered data and information related to thousands of potential taxpayers. The data has been collected keeping in view their lavish lifestyle, frequent overseas visits, huge property in the country and abroad, expensive cars and exorbitant school fee of their children.

“We are going to merge the data with the under-developing digital tax collection system,” he said.

The FBR had been maintaining a large database since long, but a lack of capacity, capability and analytics software prevented it from processing the data in order to identify thousands of potential taxpayers, he said while addressing business community at the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) later.

As a test case, the FBR issued notices to 6,000-6,500 potential taxpayers on the basis of findings that they had bought properties of over Rs20 million each and purchased expensive cars recently. “This was Rs3 billion worth of tax detection and so far we have collected Rs2.75 billion,” Khan revealed.

He said information technology-based reforms were aimed at simplifying the tax collection system to facilitate the taxpayers. Besides, it will automatically detect if someone pays lower than-the-required tax.

He said the new system would reduce human interaction, which would ultimately end alleged culture of corruption and harassment of taxpayers at the hands of tax collectors. “The system is aimed at facilitating the taxpayers, so that the business community could itself come forward to pay due taxes on time.”