ISLAMABAD: Facilitating the tax payers should be key reforms agenda for taxation system in Pakistan that could enable tax buyers to perform their national duty with ease rather than confronting with challenges at multi levels. The issues regarding taxation at federal to provinces and within the provinces were a reality and hence, must be addressed to eliminate unwarranted impediments in doing business.

The representatives from federal and provincial tax authorities and experts in financial sectors said this while sharing their views with the participants of ‘High-level Meeting on Designing Better Federal & Provincial Tax Reforms in Pakistan’ held by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in collaboration with The Asia Foundation here on Thursday.

Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Spokesman Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), said that tax payers should be more important for any revenue administration. He said that the compulsions like filing tax returns both to federal as well as provincial authorities have hurt the ease of doing business. This issue required urgent attention to get resolved so that tax payers could pay revenues to government without any hassle. Therefore, we need to define strategies for tax payer facilitation, he added.

Dr. Vaqar Ahmad, Deputy Executive Director SDPI, earlier said that the report of the Tax Reform Commission has suggested that the tax coordination issues between federation and provinces could prevent any relief to the people and it could lead towards enhanced cost of doing business. He said that SDPI research also suggested that all provinces have different tax rates and most try to tax the same shrinking sources of income and wealth – thus leading to additional burden on already taxed sectors.

He said that in order to harmonize the taxation system across provinces, all provincial governments should take measures to consolidate the large number of sub-national taxes, reduce compliance costs through merger of provincial revenue authorities and introduce a unified tax return and central deposit of payments. Besides, he said, inter-governmental tax committee for dispute resolution and to integrate audit capacities of provincial tax authorities.

The representatives from provincial revenue authorities from Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan on the occasion presented province specific issues and said that documentation of economy and generation of revenue have been some of the serious issues to works for provincial Revenue authorities.

They identified that there was a lack of tax strategy at Federal and provincial level. Likewise, obsolete tax base and lack of tax harmonization needed urgent attention. The provincial representatives added further that capacity was still a huge issue, therefore, federal and provincial tax authorities should come up with shared vision to resolve these issues.

The representative from various development partners as well as from business community including Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE),GIZ, DFID as well as WBG and US and Canadian embassies also expressed their views on tax reforms and covered various key aspects of the tax regime. They said that the consultation on provincial tax systems was important to bring about constructive reforms.