Home »Taxation » Pakistan » Taxpayers paid Rs 2.67 billion refunds following FTO orders

  • News Desk
  • Sep 20th, 2017
  • Comments Off on Taxpayers paid Rs 2.67 billion refunds following FTO orders
The orders of the Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) have resulted in payment of Rs 2.67 billion of sales tax refunds by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to taxpayers in 366 complaints during 2016. According to the FTO annual report for 2016, the FTO's interventions are extremely helpful in expediting settlement of delayed refund cases which promote economic activity. During 2016, a staggering amount of Rs 2,672.75 million, involving 366 complaints, was paid to the aggrieved tax-payers as a result of the intervention of the FTO.

The report said that the rejection of 200 representations of the FBR before the President against the taxpayers out of 371 representations means that in 53.9% cases, the recommendations of the FTO were up-held by the President of Pakistan.

Apart from 189 representations submitted to the President, 103 review petitions were also received by the FTO office. In addition, 40 review petitions were carried forward from the last year (2015). Most of these review petitions (130) were decided during 2016 leaving a balance of only 13 review petitions.

It was noticed that most of the Review Petitions filed by the FBR or the Tax-payers were rejected on reconsideration, which is a manifestation of the fact that initial recommendations were prepared following stipulated laws and regulations and no serious lapse or irregularity was noticed during review proceedings.

It is satisfying to note that the ratio of acceptance of FTO's recommendations by FBR is very high. Out of 1,610 cases decided during 2016, only 292 cases were challenged, mostly by the FBR, through representations under Section 32 of the FTO Ordinance, 2000 and Section 14 of the FOIR Act, 2013, or through Review Petition under Section 14(8) of the FTO Ordinance, 2000 and Section 13 of the FOIR Act, 2013, the report said. During 2016 the percentage of representations remained at 16.16% which is slightly lower than the average percentage (16.75%) of the last six years.



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