ISLAMABAD: The Senate Standing Committee on Finance disclosed that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) selected three parliamentarians, all belonging to opposition political parties, including the PPP, PTI and ANP, for audit through random computer balloting without having any parameters.
“Interestingly, it was push of computer button that only selected opposition parliamentarians belonging to this committee whereas no member of treasury benches was selected for audit exercise,” Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Finance Saleem Mandviwala said during the committee meeting here at the Parliament House.
The opposition members who were selected through computer balloting for audit by the FBR included Saleem Mandviwala from the PPP, Mohsin Aziz from the PTI and Ilyas Bilour of the ANP.
Acting Chairman FBR Shahid Hussain Asad told the committee that he wanted to explain with full responsibility that there was no engineering involved for selecting only parliamentarians belonging to opposition parties. “It was only coincidence that names of opposition members were selected through random computer balloting,” he added.
While briefing the committee on replacing National Tax Number (NTN) with Computerised National Identity Cards (CNIC), the acting chairman FBR said that there was no way out but to register with the FBR so NTN for all practical purposes still exists.
“There are 80 million CNIC holders in the country and if someone wants to establish business in Islamabad he or she will have to get registered with the FBR authorities,” he said, and added that for salaried class the NTN was converted by increasing its digits in accordance with CNIC numbers.
The chairman of the committee said that it seemed that the announcement of replacing NTN with CNIC was only cosmetic exercise. An awkward but interesting situation emerged during the meeting when the chairman inquired reasons for presenting “wrong figures” by the FBR. Citing example of his brief tenure as finance minister, Saleem Mandviwala recalled that the FBR’s former chairman Ali Arshad Hakim had come to his office and disclosed in presence of then secretary finance Abdul Khaliq that the FBR had provided all wrong figures. The acting chairman FBR replied that intentional effort for providing wrong information should be punished.
When the senators inquired about NADRA’s information of 1.7 million frequent travellers who are not paying any direct taxes, the acting chairman FBR said that Chairman FBR Tariq Bajwa (who is currently visiting Saudi Arabia to perform Haj) had written letters to NADRA to get the desired information but nothing was so far provided to the FBR. It was all wrong information provided by the FBR in 2012 to the Parliament, he added.
“I would love to go after such people being taxman but we were provided details of only 43,000 people by NADRA,” he added. It is all music to my ears that if the FBR had such kind of authentic information with it, he further said. He said that there were three to four million NTN holders but the number of return filers stood at just 0.9 million.
Saleem Mandviwala said that how it was possible that two organizations working in public sector under the control of same government and operating in the same country were not cooperating with each other?
On refunds issue, the FBR told the committee that the stuck up refunds of income tax stood at Rs88 billion and sales tax Rs60 billion. The FBR had cleared refunds of Rs115 billion during the last fiscal year.
During the current fiscal year, the FBR has so far provided refunds of Rs30 billion till today against Rs16 billion in the same period of the last fiscal year. The increased refunds showed that the FBR cleared liabilities of five zero rating export sector in accordance with the announcement made by the finance minister at the floor of the Parliament.