Daily Times

Punjab Revenue Authority (PRA) is considering more sectors inclu exding the real estate for tax revenues to achieve its enhanced collection target of Rs 240 billion for the current financial year.

The PRA spokesman told APP here Sunday that this institution had since its inception ten years ago been achieving significant achievements, adding that for the current fiscal year ( 2023-24), the Authority was given a target of tax collection of Rs 240 billion and to achieve this target, the PRA was focusing the housing societies, property development, developers, high-rise buildings and other related and ignored sectors having great potential to help achieve the tax collection target. He mentioned that PRA has surpassed its Rs 197 billion tax revenue target by collecting more than Rs 200 billion in a year while maintaining its tradition of excellent performance, and it also topped the revenue authorities of other provinces. He explained that PRA was initially given Rs 190 billion tax revenue collection target for financial year 2022-23, which later was enhanced to Rs 195 billion by the Punjab government and it was again increased by another Rs 2 billion i.e. Rs 197 billion. “We have crossed an important milestone by collecting Rs 200.4 billion instead of the fixed target of Rs 197 billion. Only in the months of May and June of FY 2022-23, Rs 42.3 billion was collected, which was 33 percent higher than the corresponding months of fiscal year 2021-22,” he maintained. The spokesman mentioned that in FY 2021-22, the PRA had collected Rs 170.5 billion and also received Rs 15 billion from Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) in the form of input tax.

Though this input tax was not received during last FY, PRA has successfully crossed the tax target and achieved a significant success. He claimed that PRA had been successfully exceeding the tax target for the past few years, despite the overall growth of services remained at 0.86 percent in the last financial year, this was a significant achievement. Sharing the PRA’s revenue collection plan to achieve the current target of Rs 240 billion, he said, “Around 1400 housing societies are registered with LDA (Lahore Development Authority) and an adequate revenue could be collected from these societies,” asserting that 69 companies providing services were in the PRA tax net including production houses, fashion designing, fitness clubs, telecom, banking, insurance, hotels, advertising, franchise services and security companies etc. The spokesman said that for the development of the IT (Information Technology) sector, no tax was levied on this sector in the current financial year however only five percent tax is levied on a certain portion, while the rest is reduced to zero. In hotels, he added, 16 percent service tax is being collected on invoices on cash payment and five percent in case of payment through credit cards, this has benefited PRA that instead of tax evasion, all transactions have come through the banking channel. Despite the documentation of the economy, he said, if someone commits fraud, he is fined up to Rs 500,000 and the respective business is also sealed. Regarding the complaints, the spokesman claimed that Punjab Revenue Authority is a clean organization and there are no complaints against it. He mentioned that PRA has its Head Office in Lahore with commissionerate offices in eight divisions of the province. The PRA also has an office in Sialkot while four new district offices are being built in Murree, Gujarat, Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur. He vowed, “Our mission is to make the PRA a tax collection institution of Rs. 1000 billion and we hope that we will achieve this target gradually.”