ISLAMABAD, Jan 5: Chairman, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), M Abdullah Yusuf, has said that the ongoing reforms programme would be completed by December 2009 with major focus on tax gap analysis, taxpayers facilitation, automation, plugging leakages for broadening tax regime and enhance tax to GDP ratio in the country.

“We are in the process of analysing to minimise the tax gap with the help of Data warehouse concept and the models of other countries would also be studied to address the gap and other anomalies,” he told APP here on Saturday.

M Abdullah Yusuf said the government had formulated a 10-years tax policy under which the tax to GDP ratio would be increased from existing 9.7 per cent to 15 per cent in 10-year.

He regretted that Pakistan has currently the lowest tax to GDP ratio and under the plan steps will be taken to enhance this ratio.

The FBR chairman said that during the first six months of current financial year and until Dec 31, 2.04 million tax returns have been filed by the tax payers against 1.52 million returns filed by the taxpayers during the same period of last financial year.

The FBR chairman said that his organisation had paid refunds of Rs50 billion during the last financial year while during the fist six months of current financial year, refunds of Rs27 billion have been paid to taxpayers which is almost half of the total paid during the same period this year.

About litigation of tax related matters, he said that historically this was a big issue of pending appeals, he added.

M Abdullah Yusuf said during the past three years, 82,000 pending appeals had been cleared and disposed of.

He expressed the hope that remaining pending appeals would be cleared in next six-months.

However, he attributed the delay in the pendency in the tax related cases to the unavailability of lawyers due to their strikes.

“We have no refunds pending now,” he remarked.

He said in income tax, 99 per cent refunds claims have been cleared and “we have no arrears.”

He added that in the sales tax front, 90 per cent refund claims have been cleared.

He said that because of changes in the systems, procedures and adoption of information technology in the organisation , the “level of appeals is far less than our actual appeals,” he remarked.—APP