KARACHI, Feb 6: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company has set up a probe into the accumulation of charges for value-added services, which the phone utility failed to bill on a monthly basis.
The inquiry committee, headed by a chief engineer, has been tasked to determine which PTCL officials were responsible for the delay in billing of charges for value-added services. The inquiry committee will furnish a report to the executive vice-president of the PTCL, Iqbal Waseem, within a month.
Mr Waseem told Dawn on Friday that the inquiry committee would take at least a month to come up with findings because they would have to conduct the probe in Southern Telecommunication Region I and Southern Telecommunication Region II.
In January, the PTCL collected a significant amount of withholding tax by penalizing telephone subscribers for no fault of theirs.
The phone utility included arrears of value-added services in this month's PTCL bills. Since the amount of withholding tax charged by the PTCL every month is proportional to the total bill, the subscribers of the phone utility paid a lot more withholding tax than they should.
PTCL officials admitted that phone subscribers had to pay needlessly more withholding tax because of the inclusion of arrears for value-added services, including caller's line identification.
They added that while there were a large number of value- added services offered by the PTCL, this month's bills included the CLI charges. They explained that the PTCL had not been collecting CLI charges for a long time.
Mr Waseem said the probe body had to cover a long period. "These charges have not been billed for years. The committee will first have to determine which officials were responsible for the delay in billing of charges. Those officials might be working in other departments now. They would have to be traced and held accountable," he said.
He promised that the officials found guilty of negligence following the in-house inquiry would be taken to task.
The PTCL officials explained that the phone utility charged Rs50 withholding tax on a Rs1,000 phone bill. They added that the withholding tax, proportional to the net bill, went as high as Rs300. They pointed out that the withholding tax and general sales tax collected by the PTCL was passed onto the Central Board of Revenue.
They pointed out that even subscribers who managed to get their "other charges" written off at the EOBI House would have to pay the withholding tax incurred because of the inclusion of the arrears in the bills.
They recalled that the phone utility had recently simplified the process of obtaining the value-added services of caller's line identification.
"All a subscriber has to do is to place a call to 106 from the phone on which he wants the CLI facility. He has to disclose the particulars of the phone connection. He is given the CLI facility for which is charged Rs30 every month," they explained.