ISLAMABAD:The Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) has called upon the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to include the names of those taxpayers into the Active Taxpayers List (ATL) who had filed tax returns after December 31, 2018 so that they could avail the benefits of active taxpayers.
In a statement, Ahmed Hassan Moughal, President ICCI, said that due to overload of work, slow speed of FBR e-filing system and other genuine reasons, many taxpayers could not file their tax returns before December 31, 2018, but managed to file them after due date.
However, FBR has excluded the names of such late filers from the Active List of Taxpayers (ATL) issued on March 1, 2019, which was not a positive measure. He stressed that FBR should classify late taxpayers as filers so that they could run business smoothly and have more confidence in the tax system.
He appealed to the Chairman FBR to issue instructions to all relevant officers of his department for inclusion of the names of those taxpayers, who had applied for extension in their return filing date, which was not rejected by the Inland Revenue commissioner.
He said that government was focusing on broadening the tax base to improve revenue generation. However, measures of FBR like excluding late filers from ATL would prove counterproductive. He stressed that to facilitate the tax compliance and promote tax culture, later taxpayers should also be treated as filers.
He said instead of taking measures that would shatter the confidence of late filers and discourage tax culture in the country, FBR should take steps that should extend maximum facilitation to taxpayers.
He said without taking facilitative measures for filers, it would be very difficult to bring more people into the tax net and expand the tax base of the country.