ISLAMABAD, Oct 24: The Central Board of Revenue has started a drive for tapping around 0.3 million more potential taxpayers for registration with the income tax department during the year 2003-04.

Officials told Dawn on Friday that for the first time the CBR had created two zones one each at Lahore and Karachi for the purpose of broadening tax base during the year 2003-04. These zones would be headed by commissioners of the income tax.

According to the officials, six range offices would also be created exclusively for this purpose one each at Hyderabad, Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

These range offices would be headed by additional commissioner of the income tax with deputy commissioners of the income tax who would only focus on identifying and registering more taxpayers with the income tax department.

According to the officials, these offices would be coordinated and headed by regional commissioner of income tax, northern region, Qudratullah, who was given an additional charge of programme coordinator for tax widening programme. When contacted, member direct taxes Vakil Ahmed Khan told Dawn that the government had already declared the current tax year as the year for broadening income tax base by registering more potential taxpayers with the tax department.

He said the CBR in this connection had worked out policies and a number of measures for adding more taxpayers.

Mr Khan said it was estimated that more than 0.3 million would be added to the list of existing income taxpayers, which would take the number of taxpayers to two million as the current NTN holders stood at 1.7 million.

The CBR member said it was hoped that the number of taxpayers would be in the vicinity of three million as the third party information indicated such potential in the country.

He said that for adding more taxpayers with the department, the data already collected from Wapda and telecommunication would be used in this connection.

He said currently the number of land line telephones were over 3.5 million and industrial and commercial electricity connections were over 3.6 million.

The information regarding vehicles were also collected from the registration departments and data about mobile phone holders were collected from the three leading mobile companies, he said and added information would also be collected regarding foreign travels other than Haj and Umrah, credit card holders, data provided by the taxpayers in the last three years.