TIN holders cross 1.06m
Doulot Akter Mala | Wednesday, 19 February 2014
The number of actual Taxpayers Identification Number (TIN) holders crossed 1.06 million until Monday following positive response of taxpayers to the online TIN system.
The e-TIN registration system will continue until March 31 next that the government introduced in the current fiscal year to ease TIN issuance procedure.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has introduced the system in a bid to find out actual number of taxpayers by establishing interlink with their respective National Identity Card (NID).
The TIN cell of the NBR has found existing 8,42,000 taxpayers obtained fresh TINs on the e-TIN site. Of them, some 8,12,000 are individual taxpayers, about 18,116 companies and 7563 firms.
Some 215000 are new taxpayers who obtained e-TIN. Of the new taxpayers, about 4,076 are companies and 2727 firms and the rest are individual taxpayers.
As per NBR's estimate, there are 1.7 million TIN holders in the manual system with valid addresses in the TIN forms. The income tax officials are expecting to bring all of them under e-TIN network.
Both taxpayers and tax officials are happy over the automated TIN generation system. The system was troublesome earlier that discouraged many of the taxpayers to come under tax net.
The government made TIN mandatory for obtaining some 18 types of services from both public and private sectors.
Until 2012, there were 3.7 million TIN holders in the TIN database. One-third of the TIN holders were out of reach of the taxmen. The NBR eradicated the fake and duplicate TINs in a survey across the country.
A senior tax official said the e-TIN system is a landmark in the NBR which is the first step of ensuring better services to the taxpayers.
"We are planning to open an e-TIN centre next month to facilitate the taxpayers obtain e-TIN with the assistance of taxmen," he said.
Tax officials aimed to offer the e-TIN service to the taxpayers without any expenditure, the official said.
The e-TIN centre will be set up at tax academy at new Eskaton in the city.
The centre will also resolve e-TIN problems faced by 649 circle offices of income tax wing, the official said.