ISLAMABAD, April 10: The tax authorities have claimed to have detected 33,311 fake invoices through the newly established automated refund system during the October-March period of the current fiscal year.

Member Sales Tax Ramzan Bhatti told Dawn on Thursday that following the establishment of STARR — an automated refund system on October 1, 2002 — the fake documents detected so far involved an amount of Rs905 million.

He said that through STARR, the tax authorities also detected about 13,234 fake invoices in the pending cases, which involved an amount of Rs555.49 million.

The member sales tax said since October 1, 2002 the tax authorities have paid out Rs8.56 billion to exporters up to March 31, 2003. The total number of refund claims sanctioned during the period were over 3,471.

He claimed that it was only due to this automated system which prevented the undue payment of sales tax refunds during the period.

Mr Bhatti said that for the first time it has been made possible to electronically scrutinize and sanction the refund claims. This process takes 5-7 minutes to verify a normal sized refund claim through automated system, he added.

Elaborating further, the member said that fake documents detected under sales tax invoices through this system included: documents of 909 black listed suppliers filed for claim of refunds of Rs33.85 million; 1,566 documents of closed suppliers for Rs59.45 million; 1,964 documents of de-registered suppliers for Rs68.46 million; 303 documents of duplicate invoices involving amount of Rs29.49 million; 27,912 documents of non-filer (supplier) for Rs691.04 million; 550 documents of nil filer (supplier) for Rs22.66 million and 107 documents of short-filer (supplier) for an amount of Rs0.36 million, respectively.

The member said that around 174 duplicate shipping bills involved Rs21.38 million were also detected along with around 263 sales tax mismatched documents involving an amount of Rs0.91 million during the same period.

Collectorate wise release of refunds to exporters during October-March 2002-03 through the STAAR showed that collectorate of Lahore released Rs2.210 billion; Karachi (East) Rs1.664 billion; Karachi (West) Rs2.173 billion; Faisalabad Rs2.101 billion; Multan Rs0.323 billion; Gujranwala Rs35.79 million; Hyderabad Rs51.99 million and Peshawar Rs0.14 million.

However, no refund were issued to exporters through STAAR by the collectorate of Sialkot, Quetta and Rawalpindi so far.