By Ali Imran
ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Thursday extended the date for filing income tax returns till Oct 15. In a notification, the FBR said the Sept 30 deadline had been extended by 15 days because of “serious technical problems” in the Iris portal for e-filing of tax returns.
The FBR had previously stressed multiple times that the deadline would not be extended. It had, however, directed its chief commissioners of Inland Revenue to “generously grant extensions” for filing income tax returns to people who faced “hardship of any nature”.
“The system is working seamlessly and around 150,000 returns were filed on Sept 28 which was the highest ever number filed in a single day. In the meantime, FBR, like last year has enhanced its system capacity to provide seamless services to the taxpayers,” the tax collection body said on Wednesday.
However, many social media users complained on Thursday that the Iris portal was not working. The FBR had received approximately 1.4 million tax returns till Sept 28.
The Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) earlier appealed to Prime Minister Imran Khan for an extension for a period of three months, that is, until Dec 31. The KTBA pointed out that fulfillment of 90 days’ time was provided under the law to file the return of income under section 118 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001. It further highlighted the unavailability of the FBR portal for 15 days.
“90 days’ time should only start when a flawless and error-free return of income in line with the provisions of the ordinance is uploaded on Iris portal, which per se is yet to be notified,” the association said. The KTBA further said the FBR Portal, both e-FBR and Iris “remained hacked and disabled from August 14, 2021” and it was intermittently not working properly till the end of August 2021 which again denied taxpayers 90 days’ seamless time prescribed under the law to file the return of income.
On Tuesday, the FBR issued a circular to facilitate taxpayers in filing their tax returns in the last two days with extended hours for filing of returns as well as payment of taxes. This was in addition to the extensive nationwide awareness campaign engaging national heroes, urging people to file their returns to improve tax compliance in the country.
This year, the FBR notified the tax returns from July 2021 to meet the 90-day (three-month) requirement under the tax law.
