Of them, about 98 exporters were based in Karachi, he added.
"No sooner a refund application entered electronically in the system, it would categorise the same into green, yellow and red channels," he said.
Refund falling in the first category would be sanctioned forthwith and payment sent to the applicants' accounts the same day while those falling in yellow category would be stopped for a while to check certain data and the cases falling in the red channel would be subject to scrutiny," he said.
The project has already been started in Lahore on a trial basis while it would be offered to the Karachi-based exporters in a week. The exporters have been trained how to make a refund application for the new system.
In a major facilitation bid, the Central Board of Revenue (CBR) has done away with the traditional refund application and has ruled that sales tax returns, submitted by the exporters, will be treated as refund application.
The new system, Stream, would replace the existing refund processing system of Star, which lacked the capability of discriminating between genuine and spurious refund claims.
The CBR embarked upon a policy to eliminate or curtail refund payment by exempting from sales tax certain commodities like ginned cotton and designing a system for exclusively processing bulk of the refund claims filed by the textile exporters.
The stream has been put in place to address the exporters complaints regarding delay in payment of refund blocking their working capital as well as instances of fraudulent claims filed by some exporters, causing enormous loss of revenue to the government.