KARACHI -  Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) President Shamim Ahmed Firpo has requested the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to extend last date for filing of income tax return up to December 31.

In a statement here on Saturday, the KCCI president said, “A large number of KCCI members, while seeking assistance, stated that they might not be able to file their returns by October 31, 2016 due to faulty online registration system, IRIS, which has been giving errors while connecting to the web portal and even if it was functional, the web portal has remained dead slow since last more than two weeks.”

He said the taxpayers were not only unable to e-file the tax returns and wealth statements, but were also unable to generate the tax payment challans. He urged the FBR to seriously focus on enhancing the capacity of its online system, which he claimed that was not even capable enough to deal with a meager number of less than one percent registered taxpayers who filed their Income Tax Returns in 2015. For the larger interest of revenue collection and the business and industrial community, Shamim requested the FBR to extend the last date of filing income tax returns up to December 31, 2016.