FBR devises strategy to bring all army personnel under tax net

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), after consultations with military authorities, has devised a strategy to bring all the personnel of armed forces under the tax net.

Major General Abid Ijaz, who heads the army’s Pay and Pension Administration (PPA) Directorate at the General Headquarters (GHQ), along with Chief Controller of Military Accounts, held a meeting with the FBR’s Director General Broadening to Tax Base (BTB) Tanvir Malik, chief commissioner of Regional Taxpayer Office (RTO), Rawalpindi, and other members of the tax machinery on Thursday during which the military expressed its willingness to bring all its personnel under the tax net.

With the help of army’s data, the FBR will install software forregistering all unregistered personnel on the basis of their computerised national identity cards (CNICs). The tax authorities hope to find around 70,000 to 100,000 new taxpayers with the proposed mechanism for registering all personnel of army into the tax net during the current fiscal year.

After devising a mechanism with the FBR team, Major General Abid Ijaz also met the FBR Chairman Tariq Pasha. The FBR assured the military that all facilities would be provided for increasing the number of return filers belonging to the armed forces.

Under the new strategy, the military personnel will be divided into three categories. Under the first category, the status of the personnel who are already registered and filing taxes will not be changed. Those personnel who are registered, but not filing returns will be included in the second category and they will be facilitated by the FBR to file tax returns. Unregistered and non-filer personnel will be included in the third category and the FBR will have to establish special desks at different corps of army to bring them under the tax net.

Currently, tax is deducted from the salaries of about 125,000 personnel of army as their annual income crosses the minimum benchmark of 400,000. At the FBR’s RTO Rawalpindi, where assessment is made for all army personnel, the total number of registered tax returns filers stood at 65,000 to 70,000 on annual basis. If the army’s registered personnel became filers, the number of total filers of the RTO Rawalpindi can easily be doubled.