ISLAMABAD
The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has devised a fourteen point comprehensive withholding, monitoring, and audit strategy to achieve a billion rupees worth withholding tax target for the current fiscal year (2017-18), it was learnt from reliable sources.
Official documents available with Pakistan Today disclosed a major policy shift at FBR towards achieving withholding tax targets for the current financial year. The board has devised a strategy to assign quarterly revenue collection targets instead of monthly, to the chief commissioners of Large Taxpayer Units (LTUs), Regional Tax Offices (RTOs) and Corporate Regional Tax Offices (CRTOs) for 2017-18.
The FBR has advised all chief commissioners to ensure implementation of the strategy. Similarly, all DDOs/TUs have been asked to prepare an action plan to ensure smooth, timely implementation of the strategy for maximum exploration of the revenue potential.
As per documents, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has devised a comprehensive withholding, monitoring, and audit strategy for strengthening the ongoing revenue enhancement efforts of field formations for the current fiscal year (2017-18).
The strategy comprises of the following salient features:
- Devising quarterly withholding audit plan (QWAP) by each filed formation on week before the beginning of new quarter
- Withholding agents to be included in the quarterly withholding audit plan
- Periodic monitoring/audit of excise and taxation department, property registration/recording authorities/housing societies, national saving centre(s) /post office(s) and DISCOs/CPPA to ensure timely collection of withholding taxes as per prescribed tax rates (for filers/non-filers)
- Quality desk audit(s) of at least 10 WH statements per month of potential revenue yielding entities by each unit in charge to be submitted to the CIR concerned
- Proactive monitoring of procurements (key tender notices published in the newspapers regularly intimated by the board)
- Special monitoring of payments by nonprofit organisations (NPO)
- Proactive withholding monitoring of all ongoing projects/programmes including assignment account (development/non-development), revolving fund accounts, provincial ledger accounts (PLAs), special drawing accounts (SDAs) and maintenance of database of their budget allocations, release, expenditure & tax deductions/deposits thereof with risk based, periodic audit of at least 2-3 entities (as assigned) per quarter
- Proactive monitoring of salaries disbursements especially concerning large private and corporate sector entities including statutory authorities/autonomous bodies
- Ensure effective withholding monitoring of key sectors such as telecom, banks, oil/gas/power, tobacco, textile, cement, sugar, cotton ginners, flour mills and others
- Minimum 10 per cent recovery out of Net Collectable WH Demand on monthly basis
- Recovery of remaining four-fifth of sales tax (MOST-WH) from government vendors
- Address the shortfall identified in revenue spinning sections as per monthly DRs data circulated by exploring revenue potential in other withholding sections
- Awareness workshops for education of key withholding agents/government DDOs
- Quarterly conference of commissioners (WHZs/others) & periodic visits by board team.
Sources at FBR informed this scribe, that the FBR has devised this strategy to achieve Rs 2418 billion targets for the current fiscal year has been for the ongoing fiscal year so that the field officers can plan accordingly. They said all chief commissioners have been informed in this regard.
They also said each field office can adjust its quarterly targets on monthly basis for the overall achievement of revenue estimates based on their collection trends and percentage of collection from potential areas.
Also, from now onwards, the monthly collection would be compared with the collection in the corresponding period of the previous fiscal year.
It is vital to note here that FBR has taken a major policy shift by assigning quarterly targets to taxmen instead of assigning to the field formations the monthly revenue collection targets, which was in practice in the past.
Besides, FBR has taken this major decision of assigning quarterly targets to taxmen after getting a consultation from the experts during a recently held Chief Commissioner Conference here at FBR House last week. The conference was attended by FBR members, chief commissioners LTUs, RTOs and CRTOs.
