ISLAMABAD, Feb 4: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has said that all provisions in the new Income Tax Ordinance 2002 are subject to review, consideration and approval by the Federal Cabinet and the President of Pakistan.
All the provisions in the Income Tax Ordinance 2002 like taxability of perquisites like medical allowance, house rent allowance and car maintenance allowance, etc., to persons in the public and private sectors was purely subject to review, consideration and final approval of the Cabinet, said Vakil Ahmed Khan, CBR spokesman and member Direct Taxes, in a statement issued here on Monday.
Mr Khan said that a high-level meeting, held and chaired by Secretary General Finance, Moeen Afzal here in the Ministry of Finance, discussed in detail the provisions in the Ordinance. The meeting was attended by Javed Noel, adviser to the finance minister, Riaz Ahmad Malik, the chairman CBR, and Vakil Ahmed Khan, member, direct taxes, besides other officials of the CBR.
Vakil Ahmed Khan brushed aside the apprehension and misgivings prevailing in various quarters, and said that these are not based on facts. Similarly, he said, there is no decision yet to withdraw the exemption on pensions.
He also said that the issue of additional tax liability due to these provisions was considered and discussed in detail. However, he said that the views of the stakeholders in this respect would be duly considered before any policy decision on taxation of the perquisites.
DE-REGISTRATION: The Central Board of Revenue has initiated a drive to deregister all those taxpayers who were wrongly registered with the sales tax department.
An official told Dawn that out of 136,171 persons registered with the sales tax department, more than a quarter have been deemed as non-filers that means they did not even submit their tax returns.
To track down the wrongly-registered persons with the department, the official said that during July-December period of the current fiscal 3,000 persons were deregistered as taxpayers.
Out of these, the CBR deregistered 1,552 persons in September, 604 in October, 596 in November and 217 in December.
Without properly verifying whether these people were actually doing businesses obtained from the factory sales ledgers, the department officials mailed them pro forma to register themselves as taxpayers, the official added.
By doing so, the CBR increased the number of persons registered as taxpayers from 54,000 in 1998 to 98,000 in 2000 and 136,171 persons registered with the department up to December 2001.
Moreover, the CBR has also directed the sale tax collectors to hand over the list of non-filers of tax returns to the local tax authorities to track down their businesses.
Commenting on the non-filers of tax returns, the official said that during visits to factories, the sales tax officials inspected the records of these factories and noted from their sales registers the names and addresses of the people who had ever made purchases in commercial quantities.
