Official sources told Business Recorder on Monday that the former CBR chairman, Riaz Ahmed Malik took the decision of setting up STARR refund office at Lahore for reasons unknown. Originally the system was designed to interact with the collectorates from Islamabad; hence such office at Lahore had no justification.
Now, it has been decided to transfer the system to Islamabad. The infrastructure required for communication of data from collectorates to central repository is in place. Technical staff has been allotted place, but it seems that the transfer process may take several months. The decision to transfer this project to Islamabad was taken about a year back. However, officials were not ready to give reasons for this delay.
Most of the verifications, calculations and processing would be completed through the computer system. The software called STARR refund automation programme has been enhanced with the introduction of 'STREAMS' (Sales Tax Risk Evaluation and Management System).