Staff Reporter
The Excise and Taxation (E&T) department Islamabad has collected over Rs 2.5 billion revenue including property, motor, professional and bed taxes during first quarter of the current fiscal year.
The department has also collected over Rs1.8 billion advance Income Tax besides registering 18,012 new vehicles during the same period, Director E&T Bilal Azam told media on Sunday. “This year, we have set target around Rs.6 billion and achieved approximately half of it due to improvement in tax collection mechanism and increasing the number of collection points across the city,” he added.
To a query, Azam said those areas where the collection was minimal are now being giving special attention and hoped that the set target would be achieved by end of December this year. He said that over Rs10 million bed taxes had been recovered from Serena and Marriott.
Moreover, the department is going to introduce a facility for the people to be able to pay their vehicle tax through banks rather than depositing the same with the Excise and Taxation Office, he added. The department, in that regard, had signed an accord with National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) recently to collect local taxes through mobile and e-banking.
He said the initiative would enable the taxpayers to submit the local taxes in any branch of the NBP, operating across the country. At present, he said the taxes were being collected manually through NBP’s branches and the E&T office, which had its own challenges and complications.
Transparency and timeliness were compromised in the manual system, while reconciliation of collected money was also a major problem faced by the department that would be removed after launching the online system, the director remarked.
