ISLAMABAD, Sept 30: The government has declared the current financial year as the year for broadening of income tax base by registering more potential taxpayers with the tax department.
Officials told Dawn on Tuesday that the tax authorities in this connection had already worked out policies for adding around another 0.3 million taxpayers to the tax rolls during the drive in the current financial year.
According to the officials, Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz on his return from the US would announce the policy and measures for tapping the potential taxpayers for registration with the income tax department.
When contacted member direct taxes, Vakil Ahmed Khan confirmed to Dawn that the tax department had worked out a number of measures for registering more taxpayers with the tax department.
Mr Khan said that all these measures would be announced by the finance minister shortly.
Mr Khan said it was estimated that more than 0.3 million would be added to the list of existing income taxpayers, which would take the number of taxpayers to two million as the current NTN holders stood at 1.7 million.
The member direct taxes said though it was late, still good that the government even realized that the number of taxpayers should be in the vicinity of three million as the third party information indicated such potential in the country.
He said that for adding more taxpayers with the department, the data already collected from Wapda and the telecommunications would be used in this connection.
He said currently the number of land lines telephones were over 3.5 million, industrial and commercial electricity connections were over 3.6 million in the country.
The information regarding vehicles were also collected from the registration departments and data about mobile phone holders were collected from the three leading mobile companies providing services in the country, he said and added information would also be collected regarding foreign travels other than Haj and Umra, credit card holders, data provided by the taxpayers in the last three years.
He said that all these information would be transferred to a computer data base — income tax information tracking programme (ITIT) — for tracking unregistered taxpayers.
With the help of this software, he said, all the information would be compared with the NTN numbers to identify unregistered persons. These people would then be registered with the department following the issuance of notices to them, he added.
Mr Khan said that there was no justification of tax payers being less than three million following having these information available with the government.
The total number of tax returns filed with the income tax department last year stood at 1.2 million.