Income Tax Paid Till Last Date and Number of Returns Filed

FBR has received record number of returns along with highest ever amount of income tax at the time of filing. A total of nearly 1.8 million returns have been filed together with an amount of about Rs.22 billion. Last year at this time, 1.73 million returns were filed while about 13.5 billion were deposited as income tax. Comparatively, the returns are higher by 4% and tax deposited is higher by 63%.

Moreover, the government had decided not to extend the final date of December 8, 2020 with a view to restore the credibility and predictability of the final date, and to promote tax discipline. However, to ensure that no hardship was faced by taxpayers, a number of special measures were adopted. These include liberal acceptance of requests for extension in filing date as available under the law, provision to file requests manually besides the on-line facility, enabling tax practitioners/advisors to file a single request for multiple clients; and enabling the chief commissioners to set-up special desks for collection of manual request and sorting their jurisdiction at their level.

The above described measures have encouraged a large number of taxpayers to file extension requests which are being granted. It is estimated that at least 300,000 taxpayers have made use of this facility, thus taking the number of potential returns to 2.1 million, which is 21% higher compared to last year until this date.