ISLAMABAD, May 13: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has notified parameters for selection of corporate and non-corporate cases for audit under Universal Self Assessment Scheme (USAS).

Member direct taxes and CBR spokesman, Vakil Ahmed Khan said on Thursday that the CBR had worked out four parameters for selection of corporate cases and two parameters for non-corporate cases for audit under USAS. He said that these parameters were decided in a meeting of commissioners of income tax held here recently.

He said to facilitate the taxpayers, the board further provided facilitation to the taxpayers whose cases, in their opinion, had not been selected on the basis of the parameters. Such taxpayers might contact their respective zonal commissioners to whom instructions have been issued that returns selected and not falling under any of the parameters be deleted from audit, the member said.

Elaborating the parameters, the member said that it was decided that only those corporate returns cases will be selected for audit where GP rate has declined by 20 per cent or more as compared to the higher GP rate declared in the past two assessment years.

The other parameters for selection of corporate cases included, cases of exempt units, filing returns for the first time (tax year 2003) after the expiry of tax holiday/exemption; cases where bad debts or provisions have been claimed at Rs10 million or more and cases claiming refund of Rs20 million or more in Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) and Rs5 million or more in other regions for the tax year 2003.

The parameters for non-corporate returns included, cases claiming refund of Rs0.1 million or more for the tax year 2003 and cases declaring income of Rs0.15 million and above for the tax year 2003 where assessment in past four years have been completed under self-assessment scheme.

Mr Khan said that in order to promote voluntary compliance and instil confidence in business community regarding USAS, the government decided not to select the required percentage of cases for audit.

This year a total number of 547,613 business returns were filed by the corporate and non-corporate taxpayers and only 24,020 cases were selected for audit, he said.

The member said that the cases so selected constitute only 4 per cent of the total number of business returns. It may be added that the above number of business returns did not include salary returns and statements filed (section 115(4) of the income tax ordinance, 2001) under presumptive tax regime.