ISLAMABAD, Feb 21: The Central Board of Revenue has directed all the collectorates of sales tax to select cases for sales tax audits in accordance with the new procedures.

An official at the CBR told Dawn on Saturday that the direction was made following the observation that each of the collectorates have adopted their own procedures for selection of cases for sales tax audits.

The CBR has worked out procedures in 2002 for selection of cases for audits, which was yet to be fully implemented by all the collectorates.

According to the procedures, around 50 per cent audits per month would be conducted of large units - sales tax payable over Rs1 million per month; 20 per cent audits for the month for taxpayers in case of input/output high or vale-addition one per cent or negative; 20 per cent of audits for the month for services sector - restaurants, hotels, beauty saloon, CNG stations; 20 per cent of audits for the month for null filers and 20 per cent audits for refund claims cases.

The official said that complaints were received from the taxpayers that sales tax collectorates had not fully implemented the procedures for selection of cases for audits.

According to the official, the historical data indicated that 16,000 cases of audit were initiated during the fiscal year 2002-03. Since a vast majority of the audit reports showed nil detection, it raised pertinent concerns about validity of the number of audits completed.

Similarly, since the CBR has adopted a new audit report review procedure whereby each and every report must be sent to the CBR for final review and only 4,600 reports were received during the previous financial year, it was assumed that only 29 per cent of the reported audits were actually conducted.

He said that viewed within this perspective, the performance of audit during the first quarter of the current financial year was not that gloomy after all.