KARACHI, May 9: The Sindh government is considering withdrawing discretionary powers of the officials of motor vehicle wing of the excise and taxation department concerning imposition of penalty on the vehicles defaulting in motor vehicle tax.

The proposal has been forwarded by the department and is currently being examined by the provincial finance department and is expected to be announced in July next, said director (administration) E&T, Karachi, Manzoor Awan while talking to PPI on Thursday.

He said that step was being taken to save general public from harassment they had been facing due to misuse of power by the concerned officials of the department. The discretionary powers were the main cause of corruption prevailing in the department as the officials used to exploit the penalty rules for extorting money from the vehicle owners, he said.

The department had already taken certain steps to plug revenue leakages and fixed 20 per cent of the defaulting amount as penalty.

This resulted in substantial increase in recoveries up to over three million rupees per month which previously were hardly Rs0.3 million a month. So far, the department had recovered around Rs40 million on this account, Awan said.

He said that major step for plugging leakage was closing down of manual counters at the bank branches where a number of irregularities were reported. Now the MVT is being collected only at the computerised counters of NBP, he added.—PPI