ISLAMABAD, March 14: The Central Board of Revenue has de-registered about 4,336 taxpayers during July-January period of the current financial year, who were wrongly registered with the sales tax department.

And out of this, 137,958 persons were registered as taxpayers with the sales tax department till January 2002, an official source told Dawn.

Of these, the CBR de-registered 1,552 persons in September, 604 in October, 596 in November, 217 in December and 1,336 persons in January.

To track down the wrongly registered persons, the CBR has initiated a drive to de-register all those taxpayers, who were registered as taxpayers without proper verification.

Without any proper checkup, the CBR has just kept up increasing the number of persons registered as taxpayers and raised it from 54,000 in 1998 to 137,958 taxpayers up to January 31, 2002.

Further break-up showed that the CBR de-registered 17,006 units, which were wrongly registered with sales tax department, till Dec 31, 2001, since the start of the drive of de- registration.

Of these, CBR de-registered 1,732 units in Faisalabad, 4,197 in Gujranwala, 1,302 in Hyderabad, 177 in Karachi East, 163 in Karachi West, 4,732 in Lahore, 1,843 in Multan, 196 in Peshawar, 138 in Quetta and 2,526 units in Rawalpindi.