ISLAMABAD: The federal budget for 2007-8 is likely to be of a little over Rs1.5 trillion with no new taxes, a finance ministry official told Dawn on Wednesday. Instead of providing its opponents another opportunity to criticise it by imposing new taxes, the government had decided to raise resources for the budget by ‘broadening the existing narrow tax base’, he said. Both the president and the prime minister are said to have agreed that fresh taxes have to be avoided at all costs.

The official said the revenue target was estimated to be Rs1 trillion.

Sources said the Central Board of Revenue (CBR) had been asked to target the ‘vulnerable sectors’ which were not paying their taxes.

The board was currently ‘stocktaking’ to implement an improved mechanism for increasing collection by plugging the leakages in the corporate sector, they said.

From the financial year, they said, a new system called ‘nexus’ would be enforced to collect income tax, excise duty and other taxes under one authority.