ISLAMABAD, Oct 3: The Board-in-Council (BIC) on Monday approved a new revised unified reward rules for the field formation of the Central Board of Revenue (CBR) to reduce the misuse of the facility.
An official told Dawn on Monday that the decision among others were taken at a BIC meeting headed by CBR chairman M. Abdullah Yousuf and attended by all members of the board.
To avoid further misuse of the facility, the BIC also fixed the amount of reward in a single year, which should not be more than two years salary of the employee. With the life time award should not exceed the amount of Rs2 million.
Currently, the three main taxes — sales tax, income tax and customs duty — had different evaluation parameters for distribution of rewards among the field formations. These reward rules were mainly based on deduction of concealment of tax or anti-smuggling or tax frauds. These rules had no focus on the reform objective of the CBR.
Moreover, in the old rules, the informer had a clear role. The informers had created harassment for the taxpayers. There were also reports of informers, who have not been paid or ghost informers.
The official said that under the new rules, the role of informer had been eliminated or streamlined. The informer would only get reward in case of anti-smuggling.
Elaborating further, the official said that reward would now only be based on reformed related objectives — enhancement of revenue, facilitation of taxpayers, research related work, enhancement of tax base etc.
While reward in non-reformed areas would now be restricted to liquors, IPRs issues, currency issue, arms and ammunition etc., added the official.
An official announcement said that the BIC was informed that on the whole an increase of 17.5 per cent had been achieved in the revenue collection as compared to last year’s 27.7 per cent increase was recorded in case of customs duty followed by 24.6 per cent in sales tax and 7.9 per cent in the direct taxes.
It was further informed that the collection of direct taxes was likely to increase further as the data of return was being compiled. The board noted that there had been 14.3 per cent increase in the number of tax returns.
As far as the budgetary measures of zero-rating for export-oriented industries were concerned, it was explained that there had been a net gain of Rs1.5 billion as less amount of refund was now being claimed.
