Staff Reporter
Lahore
The Punjab government will launch a mobile-phone application for all the Business-to-Government (B2G) and Public-to-Government (P2G) payments in order to facilitate the public and improve the government revenue collection through easy payment solution.
The application is being jointly developed by the Punjab Finance Department and the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB). This was disclosed by Punjab Finance Minister Makhdoom Jawan Bakhat Hashim while chairing a joint meeting of the Finance Department and the PITB in Punjab Revenue Authority (PRA).
The program will allow the people of Punjab to pay their taxes using three different electronic payment channels namely Internet/ Mobile Banking, ATM and through Over the Counter (OTC) banking transaction. The minister said that the mobile-phone application would be helpful in complete departure from the erstwhile and decades old payment process, which involved physical visits to the collection offices around the province for tax payments.
Those visits required customers to stand in long queues and wait for many hours to pay their taxes. He said that such practices indirectly encouraged bribery and corruption, but the mobile-phone application will allow customers to pay their dues from even the comfort of their homes.
In its first phase, 12 different taxes of the Excise, Board of Revenue (BoR), PRA, Punjab Land Record Authority (PLRA), and Industry Department would be paid through the application. These taxes are token tax, Motor Vehicle Registration, Transfer of Motor Vehicle, Property Tax, Professional Tax, Cotton fee, e-Stamping, Mutation fee, Fard fee, Sales Tax on Services, Punjab Infrastructural Development Cess and Business Registration fee.
