ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has urged old and new taxpayers to file their tax returns well ahead of the extended date of Oct 15.

An official announcement said the FBR notified a one-time extension of 15 days on Sept 30 and extended the return filing deadline till Oct 15 to facilitate those who faced technical hiccups on the last date.

The unparalleled awareness campaign of the FBR resulted in an immense traffic of taxpayers to the Iris website and for the first time ever over 1.8 million returns were filed within 90 days ending on Sept 30. Only in the last three days, the FBR received around 600,000 returns from all over Pakistan.

This extraordinary interest in existing and new taxpayers put huge pressure on FBR Iris online portal which caused occasional disruptions and adversely affected its functional efficiency, particularly on Sept 30 being the last day.

According to the statement, FBR uploaded forms for filing Income tax returns for tax year 2021 on July 1 and thus afforded taxpayers the statutory period of 90 days to file their tax returns by Sept 30.

On numerous occasions, the FBR reiterated its principled stance that it would not extend this period beyond the given deadline of September 30. The extension given on September 30 was only due to the fact that FBR’s IT System got overloaded and since that has been fixed now, no more extension will be allowed beyond Oct 15, the revenue body added.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2021