LAHORE  -  PRA has detected non-payment of a colossal amount of sales tax involving big private and public entities.

The said entities withheld billions of sales tax on services as withholding agents but a part of said amount was not deposited in the government exchequer. As per law, the service recipients withhold 100% amount of sales tax from service providers which is deposited in government exchequer within the stipulated time period. As per PRA Spokesperson, an exhaustive data analysis exercise was undertaken by IT Section of PRA upon the directions of the chairperson PRA. The initial findings of the exercise revealed that massive amount of tax was not deposited by these public and private entities. The spokesperson further stated that the entities need to reconcile an amount of around 40 billion.

Without naming any of the organizations, the PRA spokesperson stated that top organizations have already been show caused by the relevant commissionerates. In order to mitigate any incidence of non payment of tax in future, PRA introduced a check in its e-filing system. As per the said check, tax claims based upon the withholding declaration earlier allowed but not paid in government treasury were disallowed while making it the part of their personal liabilities. Since the taxpayers were facing difficulties in filing of their sales tax returns, the said check is temporarily removed for a month for taxpayers’ facilitation while educating them to ensure payment of tax by their withholding agents and to acquire the tax deduction certificate as prescribed under the relevant rules. PRA spokesperson stated that henceforth the taxpayers would not be able to get the credit of sales tax withheld until their Withholding Agent deposit the said amount in government treasury against their NTN/ Registration number.