FTO takes notice of tax credited to wrong person’s record

Islamabad: The Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) has taken a serious notice of an unusual case where tax collected through an electricity connection was being credited against an incorrect CNIC/tax record. This person, who was not the actual electricity consumer, had identified the true consumer of the electricity. This situation might suggest that the tax collected from the actual consumer was incorrectly attributed to an unrelated individual, allowing the actual consumer to avoid tax.

The FTO has instructed the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to investigate this matter thoroughly to ascertain how the unrelated person's CNIC was linked to the electricity connection and whether this arrangement led to tax being wrongly assigned to that person. The Ombudsman speculates that such a deliberate scheme could undermine tax authorities' data-matching and monitoring systems, enabling tax evasion by shifting a consumer's tax trail to another person's CNIC.

The FBR has been tasked with verifying the entire record of the electricity connection, identifying the true electricity user, reconciling the collected tax with the appropriate taxpayer record, and determining if any collusion, manipulation, or deliberate misuse of the system was involved.