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Thursday March 28, 2024

‘PITB e-stamping generates over Rs11b revenue’

By our correspondents
December 29, 2016

LAHORE

Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) flagship project e-stamping has touched the figure of Rs 11.064 billion. 

The PITB chairman while expressing his gratitude to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif for his continuous support and guidance in the completion of the project said e-stamping was a step towards generating revenue through technology in most transparent way and to eradicate chances of financial pilferage through an efficient and accountable system. He said the project has shown remarkable results in the shortest span of time. The experimental operation was launched six months ago. 

A number of 571,740 people visited the respective website while 516,723 vouchers were paid and a number of 417,963 e-stamp papers were issued. Dr Umar Saif, adviser to the CM, lauded the untiring efforts of all the stakeholders, Board of Revenue, respective bank and the team of PITB while congratulating the officials on Wednesday. 

It has saved the common citizen from fraud, forgery, agent mafia, long queues in the treasury office and the banks as the duration of receiving Stamp papers have been reduced from three days to fifteen minutes, which is now operative in the whole Punjab’s 36 districts and 144 tehsils, he added.

The e-stamping system has replaced 117 years old stamp paper system introduced in 1899 in the Sub-Continent during the British colonial rule. The newly-introduced system is online and any person desirous of purchasing high value non-judicial/judicial stamp paper can access the system by a simple internet connection. The value of stamp duty will be calculated on the basis of data provided by the buyer (area of the land, location, covered area, commercial / residential etc.) and DC valuation tables built into the system. The names of the buyer, seller and the person through whom stamps are being purchased will be fed into the system along with their CNIC Nos. The system has empowered the common man to verify the authenticity and value of the e-stamp paper by sending the inbuilt number through SMS on 8100.

Challan form 32-A will now be generated based on the above data and buyer of the stamp paper can go to the nearest branch of the designated scheduled bank. This challan form 32-A can be generated by the citizen himself or from the bank or sub-registrar office. On payment of stamp duty the bank counter will print the e-stamp paper on especially designed legal size paper. This stamp paper will be submitted to the sub-registrar / housing society / authority/ land developers, as case may be. These authorities will be provided limited access to the database of e-stamping where from they will be able to verify genuineness of e-stamp paper, eliminating chances of usage of fake stamps. On utilisation of the stamp paper these authorities will inform the system through a click of button, whereupon the same entry in the database will be delisted, which will restrict reuse of same e-stamp paper.

There are two types of stamps: Judicial and Non-Judicial, used for collecting stamp duty under Stamp Act 1899. Judicial stamps are used in relation to the administration of justice in courts and non-Judicial stamps are used on documents related to the transfer of property, commercial agreements etc. The non-judicial stamp papers worth above Rs 1,000 are referred to as high-value stamp papers. These stamp papers are only issued by the treasury offices of the district. Almost 95.89pc of revenue under stamp duty is collected from these high value stamps. The issuance of judicial e-stamp papers was also launched on December 23. 

In order to facilitate the public, besides Stamp Duty, Capital Value Tax, Registration and Comparison fees will also be collected through same challan.