November 28, 2006	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 6, 1427

ISLAMABAD, Nov 27: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has failed to reform the reporting system of the National Tax Numbers (NTNs) despite divergence of huge resources to streamline the information management system of the tax machinery.

The World Bank had already granted millions of dollars to finance the CBR reform process. Of these the major portion was allocated for improving the computerisation system of various taxes and for which a member was appointed by the CBR at market salary four years back.

According to official data compiled by the CBR, a copy of which was made available to Dawn, indicated that the NTNs compiled by the regional commissioners of income tax (RCITs) and commissioners of income tax (CITs) did not match the data maintained by Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL) - a subsidiary organisation of the Information Management Wing of the CBR.

The statistics showed that according to the monthly performance report (MPR) of RCITs and CITs, a total of 2.004 million were NTN holders till to date as against 2.705 million in the master NTN index maintained by PRAL.

The difference of 0.689 million cases in the data showed that either these were the nil filers or they did not file return with the income tax department and evade taxes. The CBR recently published quarterly report carried an analysis on banking sectors, which mentioned some private banks as non-NTN holders or non-filers as per their NTN master index.

Two banks - Security and Investment Bank Limited and SME Bank Limited - have provided the copy of their income tax returns to Dawn office, which they had submitted with the income tax department but these returns were not available in the master index maintained by PRAL.

According to statistics, the total number of live NTNs — means those who file returns - stood at 1.79 million. However, the MPR also showed that total number of NTNs holders at 2.004 million.

This again showed that the data maintained by the RCITs and CITs regarding NTNs also included infructuous cases. The total number of infructuous cases in five zones stood at 0.212 million. However, there was no single case of infructuous cases in the two large taxpayers units (LTUs).

In top of the list in infructuous NTNs cases was the central region, which stood at 95,261 followed by 52,225 in Eastern region, 45,811 in northern region, 15,275 in southern region and 3,977 in corporate region, respectively.

The NTN was not an important identifying number, which was used in most of the official documents, the taxpayers and the tax administrators were not satisfied with the system.

A tax official on condition of anonymity told Dawn that the major areas of concern were inadequacy of the existing NTN, co-existence of multiple NTNs and mismatch between NTN and other databases. However, he said with cleaning and cross verification of data, it would be easy to implement the common tax identifying number of federal taxes in a better way.