ISLAMABAD, Jan 27: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has decided to reconcile and capture taxpayers’ data at the regional level. Member, Income Tax, Salman, Nabi told Dawn that the decision had been taken following an observation that it was not practicable to produce accurate data of the taxpayers at the centralised level.

The CBR had established the Centralised Data Entry Centre (DEC), Islamabad, to capture all income tax returns two years ago as part of restructuring of the tax administration.

The centre was established to identify those taxpayers, who had understated their income.

The member said corporate returns will be compiled and reconciled by the large taxpayers units (LTUs) located at Karachi and Lahore, respectively.

Salary returns, employer statement and certificates will be compiled in the respective regions either in regional tax offices (RTOs) or medium taxpayers unit (MTUs), he added.

He said that the verified data would then be transferred to the central data warehouse for carrying out analysis.

To a question, he said that the data was earlier collected at the central level because of no capacity of the income tax officers.

“Now we have developed capacity for carrying out the job at the regional level,” the member claimed.The chairman CBR has also directed the income tax commissioner for reconciliation of data of taxpayers as per MPRs vis-a-vis Master Index.

The income tax commissioners have been asked to go through the files of each and every taxpayer for verification of the data.

The CBR has, so far, failed to develop a system to produce accurate data of the taxpayers who were filing income tax returns with the income tax department.