THIS refers to a news item (May 25) ‘Will not increase burden on existing taxpayers: Zaidi’ in which the FBR chairman claimed that new taxpayers who were not paying taxes presently would be brought into the tax net.

However, the very next day there was a news item, ‘Government likely to reverse tax concessions for salaried class’. This news negates the earlier claim made by the FBR chairman, since the measure will increase the tax burden on the salaried class.

The salaried class, which is one of the few categories of captive taxpayers, has been made a scapegoat by successive governments. They have been subjected to higher taxation to cover for the government’s inability to bring the undocumented sectors of the economy, particularly traders, self-employed individuals and agriculturalists, into the tax net. It is disappointing that the PTI, which made promises of collecting billions of rupees in taxes from non-payers, has been following the same old approach of squeezing the salaried taxpayers instead of focusing on efforts to expand the tax net.

Aamir Malik
Karachi

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2019