NBR to outsource campaign for netting in new taxpayers

Government's revenue authority plans outsourcing a countrywide campaign for netting new taxpayers, officials said.
The move has come following taxmen's failure to bring in new taxpayers under tax-net through similar programmes during the last few years.
Rather the dropout of existing taxpayers is relatively high compared to bringing new taxpayers onto the tax-net.
Talking to the FE, National Board of Revenue (NBR) chairman Ghulam Hussain said outsourcing involving the students and other people could help government increase the number of taxpayers.
"There should also be incentives for the students or people who will work for promoting tax culture and finding new taxpayers," he said.
He noted that the existing tax-service centres across the country had yet to prove successful in attracting taxpayers.
"People are not coming there to seek tax-related services," the NBR chief said, thereby implicitly endorsing the prevailing notion about cumbersome tax-collection system.
"Common people need to be involved with the delivery of services to income-tax payers," he told the FE about the urgency of a change.
He said new taxpayers increased but simultaneously dropout also went quite higher, causing a stagnant number of taxpayers in recent times.
The number of individual taxpayers is 1.0 million against the 150-million-strong population of the country.
The tax authority had found a number of taxpayers through external survey during the last few years but the actual number remained same during the last two years.
According to official data, the taxmen surveyed some 731,588 new taxpayers in 2009-2012 period. Of them, 547,154 have opened new tax files and are obligated to submit tax returns.
The number of tax returns almost looked at a standstill--between 0.8 and 1.1 million in that period.
Many tax offices were found unwilling to conduct external survey as taxmen are overburdened with the existing tax files that they have to maintain under manual system.
Reports said modernizing the tax system through computerization and online tax payment made little progress for reasons better known to the authorities.         
Talking to the FE correspondent, a senior tax official at a field office said new survey usually nets the marginal taxpayers who contribute an insignificant volume of income tax to the state exchequer.
The individual taxpayers contribute some 20 per cent to total income-tax collection. The revenue authority collects major part of income tax from corporate taxpayers, including commercial banks, mobile-phone companies and the like.
"We have pressure to achieve tax-collection target. So, taxmen usually lay emphasis on corporate taxpayers from where they could collect big chunks of revenue," he said.
The tax official, however, acknowledged the need for increasing the number of tax returns from individual taxpayers to widen the tax base--instead of hiking the load on a limited number.
[email protected]