ISLAMABAD: Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and Auditor General for Pakistan Revenues (AGPR) have recently joined hands to monitor trading activities of governmental vendors in order to check tax evasions worth billions of rupees According to a senior official of FBR, “The FBR in collaboration with AGPR has put a mechanism in place to monitor and access complete data of sale and purchase of government vendors through Monitoring and Invoice Verification System in order to check almost 80 percent of the sales tax evasion by the vendors.” It was also noted that the government vendors were filing only one-fifth of the sales tax on Sales Tax Return Number (STRN) with Accountant General Office (AG) on their own while evading almost 80 percent government tax due to non-availability of the STN verification facility at AGP. Sales Tax Member Dr M. Irshad, apprised, “The Sales Tax Real-time Invoice Verification Strive System’ ((STRIVe) has been put in place from July 1, to check leakages in the tax system and improve overall revenue collections.” He also mentioned that the purpose behind this system was to check the malpractice, which had been inflicting significant losses to the national exchequer in terms of tax evasion. This endeavour would also facilitate the cross verification of the STRN of all the vendors working with government, he added. The FBR would also involve District Controller Accounts for an easy access to the data of the government vendors and contractors in order to ask them to file the remaining sales tax account. However, he also mentioned that this sales tax system would not be implemented for vendors in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. “We expect that with the help of this system, billions of rupees per annum revenue could be collected by checking and removing the loopholes and leakages,” he maintained. Irshad was of the view that similar systems had already been developed to check sales tax evasion in transactions involving goods as well as electricity distribution companies (Discos) across the country. In future, however, two additional software programs were being developed to introduce the same facility in the real-estate business and motor registration system, he added. FBR was also said to have taken many incentives to facilitate taxpayers by rebooting the existing sales tax system and improving the revenue collection system by making it taxpayer-friendly, transparent and disciplined. “A renaissance is taking place to transform (the) overall system,” Irshad noted.