Daily Times

With the advent of latest techniques to facilitate tax payers for speedy filing of their returns, modern techniques adopted within the country have also helped build trust-based relationship tax collection departments and tax payers.

Moving towards modernization has not only helps to ease of doing business but also removing hiccups for tax payers they have been facing since long due to traditional mechanism in vogue. After this radical paradigm shift, most of people avoid visiting tax offices and benefit from hassle free filing of returns also showing increasing trend of on time filing the returns.

“The manual systems had made paying of taxes a cumbersome process,” says Ali Hassan Bhatti, who runs a car showroom in Multan. “We had to take off days from our busy routine to file taxes. But, now it is matter of few hours.”

Bhatti said different other income generating activities going on traditionally should also be brought into digital tax net system. Online system of ET&NC like registration of vehicles has also made processes easy and less time-consuming in registration of vehicles.” Online tax filing system has also removed extra burden from the tax officials and reduced rushed from the respective offices.

“The online tax payment systems not only help increase tax recovery but also enable people to pay taxes from home,” said Khalid Hussain Qasuri, the Excise and Taxation Officer (ETO) Admin, Zone-II Multan.

He said the department had introduced the latest e-payment system about three years back to facilitate citizens to pay their token tax, property tax and vehicles transfer fee online without visiting the excise office.

He said the e-payment facility has brought about a remarkable increase in tax revenue. “We usually used to collect 70 to 80 percent taxes during manual tax collection era. But, now touching 100 pc mark has become achievable.”

Modern means of tax recovery was need of hour to keep pace with the changing world as well as accommodating maximum tax payers increasing every year with the flourishing businesses. Qasoori said the process of recovery from defaulters was slow under the obsolete traditional practice when the department used to serve three notices on defaulters before resorting to final action against them.

“This process usually took three months to reach the stage of arrest and property sealing,” he said. “The new technology has freed officials from extra labor of pursuing heaps to search defaulters. Now the system indicates simply with a click to see the defaulters list.” He said with the fast track recovery, it is hoped that more developed work locally would be expedited as around 80 percent of the amount collected through taxes is spent on the local government projects like roads, street lights, sewerage and other small scale projects.

“The annual target of tax recovery has been increased almost three times as compared to the targets of last 10 to 15 years in the district. Therefore, ease of filing taxes and enhanced collection would ultimately result in speedy development at local government level,” he added.

Director ET&NC Abdullah Khan said that paperless transactions and payment of taxes via e-Pay was gaining popularity among the people owing to benefits like speedy filing of returns and get 5 per cent benefit in tax payment in case of availing e-payment window. “Around 70 per cent of the revenue was coming through e-payment window now.”

He said the department has collected Rs 450 million property tax till September 30 against the annual target of Rs 838 million for the fiscal year 2022-23, thanks to 10 per cent rebate that was available till Sep 30. “Now this benefit has been reduced to 5 per cent in case of payment through e-pay but it was still enough to attract people to paperless modes of payment.”

Detailing other taxes recovered till Sep 30, he said, Rs 20 million were collected as professional tax against Rs 63 million target and Rs 249 million as motor registration fee against the set recovery target of Rs1056 million. He said that payments through e-pay can be made through 30 online payment facilities like Jazzcash, easypaisa, and banks etc.

Abdullah Khan said the department was not oblivious to finding of new avenues of taxes and mentioned to bringing land used for commercial activity along highways and motorways also into tax net just last year.