Over 36,000 tax defaulters have been identified with Rs 87.93 billion outstanding against them this year by Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), according to Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.
The finance minister mentioned, in a written reply, that the defaulters owed a total sum of Rs 106.82 billion from which Rs 18.89 billion had been recovered by the FBR.
The ministers explained that the data gathered by FBR for detection of the tax defaulters came through third-party sources such as motor vehicle registration authorities, educational institutions, property registrar offices, development authorities, housing societies, electricity distribution companies, automobile manufacturing companies and withholding tax statements.
Further explaining the methods, the minister stated that transactions of each person who was not on tax roll was cross-matched with data declared in withholding tax statements and sales tax returns.
He emphasized that appropriate actions are being taken against the culprits.
Talking about the breakdown for each province, interestingly, the number of tax defaulters in Islamabad alone are higher when compared to the ones residing in Sindh and Balochistan province.
Punjab tops the list with 21,370 individuals followed by 10,776 individuals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Islamabad comes in at third with 3,437 persons whereas the count of tax defaulters in Sindh is 1,351. Uncharacteristically, only two tax defaulters were found in Balochistan.
The total amount which has to be recovered by FBR from Islamabad is much higher compared to Punjab and KP, where the number of tax defaulters is higher.
The money which is to be recovered from Islamabad from the defaulters by the FBR is Rs.52.16 billion, followed by Rs 37.84 billion from Punjab, Rs 11.43 billion from Sindh, Rs 2.62 billion from KP and Rs 2.76 billion from Balochistan.
However, FBR has seen a little success in aims to recover the money successfully. So far Rs 9.87 billion from Islamabad has been recovered, Rs 5.37 billion from Punjab, Rs 3.11 billion from Sindh, Rs. 17.91 million from KP and Rs. 507 million from Balochistan.
Catering question asked by PPP’s Taj Haider, Ishaq Dar mentioned that the amount of local debt stood at Rs. 13,430 billion and foreign debt at Rs. 5,834 billion as on May 31.
He also said that domestic debt which is to be obtained by the government during the 2016-17 was Rs 1,589 billion. The foreign debt, on the other hand, is expected to be $9.74 billion over the course of next two financial years while repayment of foreign debt will be $8.15 billion.
Responding to another question, asked by PML-N’s Chaudhry Tanvir Khan, the finance minister refused to disclose inside information including names and companies which had obtained loans from the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP). He said that the information is private and protected under Section 33-A of the Banking Companies Ordinance, 1962, and Section 9 of the Protection of Economic Reform Act, 1992.
Despite not answering Tanvir Khan’s query, he did speak up about aggregated amount of loans which have not been written off for the last five years. He said that loans of Rs5 million and above disbursed by the NBP over the last five years amounted to Rs360 billion. Out of which, Rs271 billion was outstanding comprising regular loan of Rs216 billion and non-performing loans of Rs55 billion.
via Dawn
For the first time in Pakistan’s history, I am seeing an active FBR although I am against some of the taxes imposed as they affect middle class more but still, I hope all these tax collections don’t go to waste i.e corruption, offshore accounts etc
My guess is they will publicly go after those people but privately cut deals. So if their target gives them 10% or 20% of their offshore they’ll be okay.
Where is the list???
FBR good work.