The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has failed to achieve its tax target of May 2023.
According to details, FBR has collected Rs 572 billion net revenue against the target of Rs 621 billion in May 2023.
Overall, FBR has collected Rs 6213bn against the target of Rs 6640bn in the first eleven months of the current fiscal year. Thus, the department will have to collect over Rs 1400bn in June 2023 to meet the current year revenue target.
According to FBR, the department has also issued Rs 33bn refunds during the current months.
It collected Rs 205bn under the head of domestic income tax compared to Rs 131bn in May 2022, thereby showing a growth of 57%.
A healthy year-on-year growth of 28% was achieved in the domestic sales tax with collection of almost Rs.100bn.
Around Rs 41bn were collected as Federal Excise Duty (FED) showing a year-on-year increase of 32%. However, a cumulative growth of almost 44% has been achieved in the collection of domestic taxes.
This is despite the fact that the economy has slowed down and GDP growth rate has been revised downward. Cumulative growth of almost 44% has been achieved in the collection of domestic taxes.
However, on the import side the same momentum could not be maintained due to unprecedented compression in imports. In US$ terms, imports in the country declined by 37% in May 2023 compared to May 2022.
Moreover, the import of high duty items such as vehicles, home appliances, as well as miscellaneous consumer goods such as garments, fabrics, footwear etc have been drastically reduced, changing the import mix.
This has impacted collection of Customs duties and other taxes. Despite an 18% dip in collection of Customs duties, and 11% decline in overall tax collection at import stage, FBR’s overall growth was registered at 16% compared to previous year.
16% growth in taxes in a year when inflation was 27%. In real terms taxes declined and so did tax to GDP ratio.