ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: The Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has decided to issue notices to all non-filers of income tax returns for the tax-year 2004 across the country in a bid to widen the tax base.

Member direct taxes, Salman Nabi told Dawn on Tuesday that the non-filers would be identified through information collected from income tax returns, which would be fed in the centralized data centre established in Islamabad. The information, the member said, would be compared with the information already exist in the computer index to detect the non-filers.

As many as 1.092 million income tax returns were received by the tax authorities till October 15, 2004, which, he said, was higher by 38 per cent from the last year.

Following the detection of taxpayers through the data centre who have not filed their tax returns with the income tax department this year, he said notices will be issued to them for filing of tax returns.

The CBR has projected a target of 1.2 million tax returns to be received for the tax year 2004. However, the revenue collection with the filing of tax returns registered a growth of 239 per cent.

Mr Nabi said that tax officials have started converting the data received through the returns form into the computer system for making further analysis.

The CBR has issued new national tax numbers (NTNs) to 504,350 taxpayers in 2003-04 as against 18,816 in the previous year. With this addition, the total number of NTN holders have crossed the figure of 2 million.

With this increase in the NTNs, it was hoped that the number of tax returns would also increase further, added the member.