FBR likely to face shortfall of over Rs100bn in April tax collection

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has been facing a major blow as the tax machinery is expecting a shortfall of over Rs100 billion in achieving its monthly envisaged tax collection target of Rs586 billion for April 2023.

Now the possibility of achieving the upward revised target of Rs7.64 billion seems impossible in the remaining last two months of the current fiscal year. It is yet to see how the government is going to satisfy the IMF on the revival of the stalled Fund programme, because given the prevailing circumstances, the IMF gives set prescriptions either to take additional revenue measures or slash down the expenditures to restrict the sacrosanct budget deficit and especially primary deficit target.

Despite imposing additional taxes of Rs170 billion through a mini-budget under the IMF conditions, including hiking the GST rate from 17 to 18 percent and slapping 25 percent GST on certain luxury items, the government’s move failed to yield the desired results so far in the last two months of March and April 2023. Although the FBR did not release any official figures on Friday, the sources disclosed that the FBR would be heading towards a shortfall of around Rs100 billion for the outgoing month, April 2023.

The FBR has so far collected Rs5.64 trillion in the first 10 months period in accordance with provisional figures and now it will have to collect approximately Rs2 trillion in the May and June period in order to display the desired tax collection target of Rs7.64 trillion on June 30, 2023.

The FBR was eyeing to fetch Rs2.58 trillion in revenues in the April-June period for materialising desired annual tax collection target of Rs7.64 trillion but the tax collection remained dismal with the expectation it would remain short of Rs100 billion. It would be quite hard to materialise the desired annual tax collection target despite a massive surge in inflationary pressures, devaluation of the exchange rate, and imposition of over Rs800 billion in taxes slapped by the government in the ongoing financial year so far.