Telecom News Bulletin

The Federal Board of Revenue’s multifarious efforts to meet the tax revenue target without further burdening industry and businesses are only possible if the system is automated. Shahid Hussain Committee report reveals that, there should be a shift from the manual system of operations to a fully automated and information based system. The manual systems cannot cope with the current and future volume of operations.

It is important to re-engineer the existing business processes before migration to automated system. PaCCS has improved Pakistan’s economy tremendously, as already seen each day reduction in the business cycle saves Pakistan approximately 3 Billion Rupees. PaCCS dramatically improved the speed of doing business and for the first time, our trade cycle started improving. PaCCS not only implemented meaningful reforms in Customs, it proved that if we put our mind to it, we could achieve great things. It has decreased the dwell time for customs clearance, which has helped exporters as well asimporters in a great way, he said.

PaCCS has minimized tax payers and tax collectors interaction, simplify complex systems and rules, reduce Discretionary Powers, strengthen Monitoring and Accountability and increased transparency. The PaCCS software product is glitch-free. If necessary, alterations should be made with a single focus on betterment of country, says report. The developers of that revolutionary software should be taken on board while finalizing changes so that transparency can be ensured. Government should ensure that importers not registered as active taxpayers don’t import anything, he demanded.

With such a great system effective in FBR, it is a shame that FBR is bent on shutting it. Recently FBR has gone on record to state that it is shutting down the system and replacing it with PRAL’s one custom. PRAL who we all know has been known for fraudulent activities and the weak technology that it deploys which enables hacking and stealing very easy activities by their very own clerks.

Pakistan is one of the 3 countries in the world that have such a state of the art system and unfortunately for our economy FBR will make sure we become the worst off in the world.