LAHORE: The Punjab Revenue Authority (PRA) Friday organised a motivational-cum-awareness workshop to update stakeholders concerned on the recently developed Beauty Salon Invoice Monitoring System (BIMS).
Organised by the PRA in collaboration with GIZ, the workshop ‘Tax Clinic’ was aimed at educating taxpayers and enhancing the scope of taxpayer facilitation in beauty salon sector.
PRA Member Operations Javed Ahmad, Member Legal Kamran Ahmed, Member Policy Dr Uzma, Commissioner Appeals Shehzad Mehmood Gondal, Commissioner Headquarters Abdul Jawad, Additional Commissioner Headquarters Ali Mansoor, LTBA President Fakharur Zaman and famous beautician Musarrat Misbah were present on the occasion. Speaking on the occasion, Punjab Finance Minister Dr Ayesha Ghous Pasha said that the provincial government was improving revenue collections to be spent on major development projects.
She said the revenue being collected through taxes was being spent on education, health, public transport, clean drinking water, irrigation, agriculture and industry to improve quality of an ordinary man and boost economy. “The PRA wants to make the tax culture easy for taxpayers with enhanced accountability. We have to move forward with information technology initiatives and self-assessment to ensure spending of taxpayers’ money for the welfare of taxpayers,” she said.
Pasha said the initiatives like Tax Day and establishment of e-courts were the part of promoting tax culture.
The minister said that the PRA had received good response from beauty salon entrepreneurs who came forward for receiving facilitation. She urged women participants to play their responsible role towards taxable income and join ‘tax clinic’ for diagnosis of their problems and its description.
She said the authority would also introduce other sectors in the tax clinic initiative.
She said that the government had introduced many reforms in the tax sector, which had increased the revenue of the province by 45 percent and also generated an additional sum of Rs 47 billion.
She said taxpayers were bound to fullfil their national obligation to pay taxes whereas the tax collecting agencies were also bound to provide them facilities.
She added that the PRA was committed to introducing a portal in near future to address taxpayers’ complaints.
The minister said tax clinics are running on regular basis for the low income groups and the less informed Taxpayers in the advanced countries. But in our country PRA is taking lead among all the revenue collecting agencies of the country by introducing such as initiative. Purpose of running such tax clinics is to diagnose and provide remedy for the people who are averse to the use of cumber some processes.
Published in Daily Times, September 30th 2017.