ISLAMABAD, Dec 17: The government has decided to add 0.3 million potential taxpayers to the tax rolls during the current financial year.

Addressing a news conference here on Tuesday, the member direct taxes and CBR official spokesman, Vakil Ahmed Khan said that the government has declared the current financial year as the year for broadening of income tax.

Mr. Khan said it was estimated that more than 0.3 million would be added to the list of existing income taxpayers, which he said would take the number of taxpayers to 2 million as the current NTN holders stood at 1.7 million.

Mr Khan said, hopefully, within the next two years the number of potential taxpayers would reach to three million as the third party information indicated such potential in the country.

Elaborating the programme for broadening of the tax base, the spokesman 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 lines telephones were over 3.5 million, industrial and commercial electricity connection were over 3.6 million in the country.

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

He said that all these information would be transferred to a computer data base-income tax information tracking programme (ITIT) for tracking un-registered taxpayers. The system was aimed at identifying those people who should be in the tax net but they were evading taxes, which would be initially installed at Lahore.

With the help of this software, he said, all the information would be compared with the NTNs numbers so that to identify un-registered persons. These people would be then registered with the department following the issuance of letters instead of any notice to them, he added.

Mr Khan said that those identified would not be asked about their past liabilities but would be only asked to apply for getting NTNs from the tax department for filing returns from the next tax year. To a question, he said that two zones were created one each at Lahore and Karachi which could exclusively carry out the work of broadening of tax base.

Mr Khan said that the decrease in the number of returns this year was due to increasing the threshold from Rs60,000 to Rs80,000 due to which the number of tax filers decreased.

The spokesman said that CBR would not go for any penalty in case any person identified non-filer tax return.