ISLAMABAD, May 7: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has decided to issue National Tax Numbers (NTNs) to around 0.3 million taxable persons across the country during the tax-year 2004-05.

An official source in the CBR told Dawn on Friday that the NTNs would be issued on the basis of new National Identity Cards (NICs) available with the income tax department.

These NIC numbers mentioned in the tax returns filed this year would be verified from NADRA, the official said and added new NTNs would be issued without charging any fee from these taxpayers.

According to the statistics, only 0.692 million taxpayers have written correct NTNs in their income tax return forms filed this year with the income tax department out of total tax returns of around one million.

The analysis was carried out of income tax returns collected from the Centralized Data Entry Centre (DEC), Islamabad comparing them against the available data of 1.964 million in the NTN Master index recently established as part of re-structuring of tax administration.

The filing of only 0.692 million correct NTNs in the income tax returns this year means that around 1.271 million people have not filed their tax returns this year. However, the official said that CBR would soon carry out further analysis of the data collected from the DEC to find out the actual number of non-filers.

He was of the opinion that many people have got their NTNs during the previous years but later they had closed down their businesses without intimating the income tax officials.