KARACHI, Aug 15: The leaders of the textile industry have asked the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) not to make e-filing mandatory because of low computer literacy in the country.

The FBR has made e-filing of sales tax and federal excise duty returns mandatory from August 15, 2008 but these leaders have apprehensions about the success of the electronic filing.

Naqi Bari, chairman Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers Association, Shabir Ahmed, chairman, Pakistan Bedwear Exporters Association and Javed Bilwani, a business leader, argue that besides low computer literacy rate in the country the FBR is also not technically equipped to attend a large number of e-filers.

They asked the FBR to give option for filing of returns manually, which will also help it to collect due tax from the taxpayers.

Moreover, in many cases trade and industry has to work through intermediaries (service providers, suppliers etc), who mostly belong to small and medium set ups having no education background not to talk about computer literacy.

Therefore, it would be difficult for the business community to meet this mandatory condition at this stage.

They said that the taxpayers were already burdened with rules and condition imposed by a large number of federal and provincial agencies and this has resulted in raising cost of doing business.

Business leaders explained that FBR itself was yet not properly equipped to cater to the large number of e-filers because of the fact that the taxpayers’ database of the board is still incomplete. The Pakistan Revenue Automation Ltd (Pral) picks up the data for the FBR but usually there is a lot of mismatching. The National Tax Number (NTN) fed in data base of Pral some time does not match with the hard copy.

Mr. Bilwani said that as the objective of e-filing was to reduce direct contact between taxpayers and tax collectors but in many cases even the soft copy of the return is not picked up by the FBR data base thereby inviting objection: “Return not filed properly”. Above all, he said because of excess traffic on the FBR portal their system is chocked and many a time the taxpayers can not have access to the website.