KARACHI: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) on Tuesday asked the Inland Revenue (IR) offices to extend working hours to help taxpayers pay duty and taxes during the final two days of the year.
The revenue board issued an order directing tax offices to stay open and observe extended working hours until 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 30, 2021, and until 12:00 a.m. on Friday, December 31, 2021, in order to assist taxpayers in paying duty and taxes.
The chief commissioners have been instructed to establish liaison with the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and authorized branches of the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) in order to ensure that tax collections from these branches are transferred to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on the same date and accounted for in the December 2021 collection.
The central bank has already given banks instructions to help taxpayers by operating bank offices for long hours.
On December 30 and 31, 2021, the SBP-BSC offices and NBP branches will have extended banking hours until 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., respectively, for the manual collection of government taxes and duties, as well as the ADC’s Over Counter facility.
Nift will organize special clearing at 8:00pm on December 31, 2021 for same-day clearing of payment instruments, according to the central bank, to enable same-day settlement of tax collections on December 31, 2021.
Furthermore, 1Link will arrange for the settlement batch of transactions conducted via the ADCs platform to be sent to the SBP for settlement in government accounts till 10:00 p.m. on December 31, 2021.
The SBP said that the NBP branches must settle their December 31, 2021 transactions with the corresponding SBP-BSC field offices/head by 10:00 p.m. on the same day, December 31, 2021.
To avoid tax receipt spillage, the NBP stated it would guarantee that no instrument relating to government receipts submitted outside of business hours would go unattended at any NBP branch and would be settled on the value date of December 31, 2021, via special clearing.