ISLAMABAD, Feb 25: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) will reduce the bulk of paper work within the next three years by introducing automation in the income tax department for ensuring quality of income assessments.

An official source told Dawn on Tuesday that under the Universal Self Assessment Scheme (USAS), to be effective from July 1, 2003, the workload would be manageable, and the time management would make it possible to concentrate on tax audit and taxpayers facilitation.

To ensure the problems of amended assessments under the new regime, all the officers would be properly trained on provisions of the new ordinance, the official said.

The official report, compiled by the CBR on enhancing of quality of assessment, suggested that all the taxation officers involved in the audit and assessment work, might compulsorily submit a detail accounts examination report of at least two cases on monthly basis.

From these reports, 12 best reports could be selected, compiled and circulated amongst the CBR officers for enhancement of their knowledge.

The report, obtained by Dawn, says that the honest taxpayers could be asked to share their knowledge with the tax officials for ensuring better quality of tax assessments and for preventing any miscarriage of justice owing to ignorance or insufficient knowledge.

Although the law prescribed a period of two years for the finalization of an assessment, yet the disposal time given by the CBR spanned about 6 months, generally for amended assessment.

This creates an unnecessary rush forcing the assessing officer to make hasty assessments for adherence to the time schedule.

The report recommended that good assessment/audit work required optimum use of time, skill and knowledge. An assessing officer needs to give maximum time to his audit and assessment work.

It further suggested that to encourage the officers, the CBR should single out 10 best assessment orders in each assessment year and give their authors cash rewards and recommendatory certificates.

The report says that income tax management system might be implemented in the country. The computerized calculation and processing of taxes would itself flag the deficiencies in the matter of additional taxes, thus saving the time and effort in this regard.