Islamabad: In a major development, the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Tuesday issued strict legal guidelines to the relevant departments to block the mobile phone connections of more than half a million non-filterers, as the drive to voluntarily register vendors also failed. only 75 dealers benefit from this plan.
Tax officials faced another setback on Tuesday when 10-month tax collections fell by nearly $40 billion. Against the target of $7.414 trillion in July-April, the FBR has temporarily raised $7.38 trillion 31% collection growth in 10 months.
This development has fueled discontent in the tax machinery over the government’s decision to sack 25 corrupt and incompetent officials. A general group of customs officers met on Tuesday and considered whether 450 officers, aged between 17 and 22, could file a large number of applications for strike or furlough.
The FBR has issued an Income Tax General Order (ITGO) to block the mobile phone SIMs of 506,671 people who are not in the active taxpayer list but have to file tax returns for the tax year 2023 as per the provisions of Income Tax Ordinance, 2001, as reported by FBR.
A person can have more than one SIM card and all these links will be cut immediately, said a senior FBR official. About 1 million to 1.5 million SIM cards will be blocked due to the FBR order, he said.
All these tax reminders and notices are very important steps, which the FBR needs after failing to convince people to comply with their legal obligations. According to the law of the parliament, every person who earns 6000000 dollars in annual income or owns a car or a house of at least 1000cc must file an annual tax.
The FBR issued tax notices to 2.4 million people who did not do such screening and in the first phase blocked more than half a million SIM cards with taxable income who had previously filed returns but failed to file this time.
Of these, 450,000 people were identified by the FBR and the remaining 50,000 used third-party data on their spending and consumption patterns.
FBR Chairman Malik Amjad Zubair told Tiwana that the government is fully committed to finding those who do not filter and it will not end with 500,000 people.
For the 2023 tax year, only 4.5 million people have filed annual returns so far, compared to 5.9 million for the 2022 tax year.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and all telecom operators have been directed to ensure the immediate effect of the FBR order.
The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) – a joint civil-military body – will seek regular updates from the FBR and PTA.
