KARACHI: The Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) has once again drawn the attention of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) towards malfunctioning of its e-filing system and demanded the Oct 31 deadline be extended further for filing of tax returns.
The KTBA pointed out that the Integrated Revenue Information System (IRIS) – being used for e-filing – is creating problems in preparing tax returns and wealth statements for the tax year 2016.KTBA President Syed Rehan Hasan Jafri in a letter to the FBR chairman said IRIS is not only slow but many a times fails to properly workout the tax payable. The data punched by taxpayer is also not being properly calculated according to the Income Tax Ordinance 2001, he added.
The IRIS system, he said, has been malfunctioning for the last 15 days and continues to show errors on the web-portal which leaves no option for taxpayers and they are unable to e-file their returns, wealth statements and even fail to generate tax payment challans.
The KTBA has time and again drawn the attention of the FBR higher-ups towards e-filing issues and even approached the Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL), but to no avail.
Mr Jafri urged the FBR chairman to sort out the issue on a war-footing as it was frustrating taxpayers struggling to file their returns before the deadline.
Some of the issues faced by taxpayers and consultants using IRIS include incorrect working, creation of wrong tax demand for association of persons (AOP), and no calculation of senior citizen rebate at 50 per cent of tax demand.
Published in Dawn October 27th, 2016