Chairman Federal Board of Revenue Shabbar Zaidi has announced that the banks have provided the data of account holders having a balance of more than 5 million rupees. He disclosed the important update in a meeting with the National Assembly’s Standing Committee for Finance headed by the former finance minister Asad Umer.
Zaidi told that the FBR asked the banks to provide data of the customers having more than 5 million rupees in their accounts. Through the data, the bureau will analyze the ratio of taxpayers and tax evader. Earlier, the bureau also obtained the data of Withholding Tax (WHT) deductions from the banks. It is also aiming to obtain data of holdings of more than one kanal land.
The data would be used to ascertain the earnings of those individuals and their tax payments to determine if they pay appropriate tax or not. While commenting on the data, Zaidi said that there are over 4.5 million accounts that fall in the criteria, yet only 1.2 million of those are registered taxpayers. Similarly, out of 341,000 industrial electric users, only 43,000 are active sales taxpayers.
FBR is all geared up to take strict actions against the tax evaders as it is highly driven to expand the tax net to achieve the massive revenue collection goals. The Chairman also mentioned that the bureau had restricted access to data earlier, but now due to the assistance of the State Bank of Pakistan, we have the data without any turmoil. Talking about the tax amnesty scheme, he again emphasized that there would be no further extension in the expiry of the scheme.
Chairman of the Standing Committee also answered the questions of the members of the National Assembly. However, the details of collection or the declarations were not disclosed.
