Online Correspondence of Tax Notice: Real-time coordination with the Tax body:

You surely may have been tired while receiving the tax notices, preparing its reply manually, and submitting it while visiting the concerned tax office.

So, your worrisome query has been eased by the FBR. Find out below how?

There is a new update regarding the IRIS portal of the FBR; we will discuss it in this blog, its purpose, and what benefits it will have for the taxpayers in the future.

Log in to the IRIS Portal and click on the MIS tab; a new page will open afterward. Multiple tabs will be there on the new page like foreign assets, fcy domestic, domestic assets, e-hearing, payment details, and action plan execution.    

You have to know about the purpose of action plan execution, as it is the new addition. So let’s dig into this. If you click on action plan execution, you will see different new tabs: risk category, deficiency description, action plan, parent action plan, due date, actual date, status, and action.

Now, why do these additions exist? What is their purpose? Will you receive the orders online? Will you communicate online with the FBR? And can you see your status anytime? 

Let’s discuss its central idea, exploring the 4-5 key factors and the motive behind the development of a new update for which; why the FBR introduced the action plan execution.   

Reduce the paperwork:

What was happening before this? If ever you received any order from the FBR and often still you may also be receiving an order. So now you would eventually receive a message on your IRIS inbox or an email that reads ‘you have been selected for your audit, and you have to do correspondence of it, and that is its due date’ whatever it could be.

Further you could also receive the message manually in the form of a letter through a courier or post office. In the letter, it is mentioned that a notice has been issued in your name. After that, you need to reply to this notice; after replying to it in the form of preparing the message manually, you have to submit it to the concerned office within the due date.

This wastes the taxpayer’s time, commute expenses incurred by the taxpayer, and a burden of paperwork on the FBR. So, according to the new update in the portal, you will reply to the notice in the IRIS. The information and update of the notice will be displayed in the place execution tab, including its date, history, and scanned documents.

This process will reduce the load on both sides, and the paperwork burden will end. All the communication and coordination will be conducted online.        

Increase Efficiency:

Suppose you have the due date of today at 12:00 AM and the official closing time of the office premises is 5:00 PM, so you can’t send the reply because the office gets closed after this time.

But while online, when you have extended due date and time, you can submit it online at anytime, so it will be considered on-time response submission.

So, this will lead to the increase in efficiency of the department, which will benefit you (the taxpayer) in return.

Online Communication:

FBR has learned from others during the covid about transforming the physical working environment into online working.

The departments within and the officials are getting used to harnessing the online communication medium to save time and make communication meaningful, bookkeeping the record online on both ends.     

Identification of Risk:

This is the most important among all. Suppose you received any notice on the clause of income tax or sales tax, whichever section, so its risk category is already defined in the FBR internal policy, like which notice is on high risk and what risks are in which category.

Accordingly, the departmental employees are got trained. Suppose there is a high-risk notice in the A category, so a special team or departmental wing of the FBR will entertain it.

This makes the data coordination more analyzed from both ends.           

Inter-Department Association:

Suppose you communicate with a department within the tax, and commissioner appeal has passed the order, and you claim it Bonafede (no genuine order passed). So, you went to appeal it to the commissioner appeal. And you visited the second court for lodging an appeal. During the appeal, the concerned parties are presented; one is the department officer, and the other is the tax representative, who is you.

There a discussion to be started, you have your arguments, and they have them. Communication means in the internal department, which is the commissioner appeal and the concerned department officer, so there is a lot of gaps between them. Often the commissioner appeal decides to be biased or unbiased.

There are a lot of documents to be put on record in which how many orders are there in which the department charged the tax in the initial stage, but the commissioner appeal waived it off or how many orders are there in which the department charged the tax and even the commissioner appeal didn’t accept it. And also, how many orders are there in which the department charged the tax, and then the commissioner appeal agrees on 30-50% of the order. No proper documentation and record-keeping are available to the department currently. These steps are being taken into consideration to smoothen, streamline and automate the internal system.