No further extension in tax amnesty scheme: FBR

ISLAMABAD: The tax amnesty scheme will not be extended beyond midnight on Tuesday (today), the Federal Board of Revenue announced on Monday.

Slightly more than 64,000 individuals have so far availed these schemes, paying Rs107 billion in taxes on the value of assets that the people declared under offshore and domestic amnesty schemes.

The board urged people to take maximum benefit of the window of opportunity before the final date.

Roughly, Rs25 billion are expected to be deposited this month, bringing total tax contributions to Rs122 billion, according to FBR officials.

The last date for declaring hidden assets under the tax amnesty scheme is July 31 and there is no possibility of any further extension, a brief statement by the FBR quoted its chairperson Rukhsana Yasmeen as saying.



She emphasised that this was the last opportunity and people should declare their hidden assets over the next 24 hours.

PTI’s government-in-waiting is against such tax amnesty schemes and has been opposing it since the previous PML-N government launched it in April this year.

There is no change in PTI’s stance in this regard, said Asad Umar, PTI’s nominee for the post of finance minister.

In April this year, prime minister-in-waiting Imran Khan had termed the amnesty scheme a “brazen attempt by [then-]prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi to save criminals”. He had termed the scheme ‘a slap on the face of honest taxpayers’.

The last PML-N government had announced the scheme to allow people to declare their hidden domestic and offshore assets amid a drive against tax evasion by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The scheme was also expected to provide a boost to the country’s depleting foreign currency reserves. However, the objective of providing a cushion to the forex reserves could not be achieved.

On June 30, President Mamnoon Hussain promulgated an ordinance, effectively extending the scheme by a month. The scheme had originally been offered between April 10 while it was set to expire on June 30, but people started availing late because of delays on the part of the authorities.

At the beginning of this month, the public response had been lacklustre, but it picked up in the past week, said Yasmeen. But she said that the overall response was still better than the FBR’s expectations.

So far, more than 64,000 declarants have paid Rs107 billion in taxes, out of which Rs9.9 billion were paid during the first 28 days of July.

Around Rs41.6 billion or $333 million have been collected on foreign assets, including Rs5.6 billion paid in July. The tax paid on domestic assets stood at Rs65.3 billion, including Rs4.3 billion contributions made in July.



Earlier this month, the Ministry of Finance has declared the response to the amnesty schemes as “unprecedented”.

People have whitened Rs2.1 trillion worth of hidden assets.

The assessment by consultancy firm AF Ferguson showed that Pakistanis had $150 billion in hidden foreign assets. It had hoped that about $3 billion to $5 billion could be repatriated to Pakistan.

But the provisional results are very disappointing compared with what the FBR and the SBP had hoped to achieve. Still, the tax contributions from the amnesty scheme have helped the FBR to improve its overall low tax collection. The tax contributions in July helped in attaining over eight per cent growth in revenue collection this month against the same period last year.