Lahore : The Federal Board of Revenue’s decision to receive only online withholding statements, ends up penalizing taxpayers, as the move has ignored the fact that its e-filing system of Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) has been overwhelmed with technical glitches. Frequent changes in the format of IRIS have aggravated the issue and the software does not accept statements often. “The matter has become graver since no documents are accepted by Federal Board of Revenue manually.”
Experts suggested the government to allow manual processing of the requests till said system is thoroughly tested and made fully functional, as this hindrance is badly affecting smooth flow of business activities in the country. They said that the today’s world, Information Technology is of prime importance as it saves precious time of the business doing people therefore concerned authorities of the FBR should pay immediate attention towards this important issue.
They said that Federal Board of Revenue’s online portal is creating problems since long but business community is unable to understand that why immediate attention was not paid to solve the issue. He said that tax authorities would have to facilitate the business community in maximum to achieve the massive revenue target set for the ongoing financial year.
GCCI President Samee Ullah Ch urged the Federal Board of Revenue to resolve the issue of inactiveness of online services at its portal.
Quoting the data, he said that electronic filing of withholding tax statements were declined by 40% to 65,000 in first quarter from 90,000 of last year, mainly because of cumbersome web-based software of FBR.
Samee Ullah Ch said that the Gujranwala Chamber of Commerce & Industry has been constantly receiving complaints from its members to face serious problems while working with FBR’s online services as their online request do not go through the online portal and cannot be retrieved by the concerned Collectorate for further processing.
He said that withholding tax collection surged from Rs70.62 billion in 2000-01 to Rs578.4 billion in 2013-14. The number of withholding categories rose to 35 in 2014-15 from 25 in 2000-01. There are several glitches in the system that end up penalizing taxpayers. He observed that the FBR introduced a system for which the country was not prepared, as computerization of the tax system has created problems instead of facilitating the taxpayers, he said and criticized the practice of picking filed cases for audit manually.