The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Thursday extended the date for filing income tax returns for individuals and companies to October 15, 2021, keeping in view the demand of the business community and technical issues faced by tax filers.
As per reports, people willing to file the tax returns were facing problems as the FBR’s portal crashed on the last day set by the country’s supreme tax collection body.
The tax-collection body had received many applications for the extension of the deadline of filing income tax returns.
Earlier on Wednesday, the FBR had decided against extending the statutory date of filing of income tax returns for Tax Year 2021.
The board had decided that the last date of filing of returns September 30 will not be extended for individuals, association of person (AOPs) and companies which are required to file income tax return by the due date.
An FBR official announcement said the last date of filing of income tax returns for individuals, associations of persons and companies having special tax year is Sept 30, 2021. “The system is working seamlessly and around 150,000 returns were filed on September 28 which was the highest ever number filed in a single day. In the meantime, FBR, like last year has enhanced its system capacity to provide seamless services to the taxpayers,” the statement said.
In order to render the entire process of filing for extension and granting of time to taxpayers for filing of tax returns, IRIS is being modified to make it facilitative and less time-consuming.
“I don’t understand how the government expects to broaden its tax base when these technical issues persist,” a frustrated taxpayer told Profit, wishing not to be named.
He further suggested that the government should hire services of taxation experts to overcome such shortcomings and to spare citizens the hassle of waiting for hours at end to file their returns.
However, while it has said that it “would generously grant extensions in all cases of hardship of any nature”, the application for this has to be filed through the very system that has suffered the outage, leaving filers in a fix.
Additionally, the FBR has also said that a person who fails to file the return within the due date will have to pay penalties.
According to the income tax circular 7 of 2021 to explain the Tax Laws (Third Amendment) Ordinance, 2021, a penalty of Rs1,000 or 0.1% (whichever is higher) of tax payable for each day of default will be imposed. However, the minimum penalty shall be Rs10,000 in case of individuals having 75 percent or more income from salary and Rs50,000 in other case, and the maximum penalty shall not exceed 200 percent of tax payable by the person.
