PRAL – a Federal Board of Revenue (FBR)-owned company and its information technology backbone – is being run on an ad hoc basis. Resultantly, these factors have undermined the government’s desire to use information technology as a tool to broaden the tax base and increase revenue collection from existing taxpayers. The number of return filers did increase from 1.8 million to 2.6 million after the FBR gave repeated extensions and delayed the close of the tax year 2018 by 11 months. However, the additional tax payments by these 800,000 additional filers were less than Rs4.5 billion, according to the FBR. Inquiries had also been launched in the past against some PRAL officers for issuing illegal sales tax refunds but no action was taken.

Source: The Express Tribune October 16, 2019 02:48 UTC