Dear Murad Ali Shah, do you even know
what Sindh’s tax collectors are upto?
In the budget speech
Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah noted that the current fiscal year has been
a year of phenomenal changes both within and outside the country. PHOTO: APP
Dear Murad Ali Shah,
It is well known that if you want to get anything done in your
province, you have to pay the right people. In most cases, the right people are
the ‘baboos’ as
they are the ones who can skilfully insert whatever you want in any document
knowing that the person who approves it will do so without reading it.
Sometimes,
if a baboo is
not paid anything or not paid what he wants, he can do the opposite; he can get
a tax imposed or increased on a particular commodity
or service. This is what seems to have happened in the recently announced Sindh budget. Sindh now has the dubious distinction of
being the only province in the country which recovers sales tax from the fledgling Information
Technology (IT) services business. Even the federal government has exempted the IT sector from taxes. So what’s the
aim of this harassment, do you want to kill the IT business or drive it away to
the other provinces? If I were you, I would immediately transfer the baboo or
whoever is responsible for this to the remotest corner of the province (where
he will not be able to earn the millions he is doing now).
Sir, your recent budget has a deficit of Rs14 billion, which means that your
expenditure for the year will be greater than your revenue by that amount.
Being the finance minister of the province, you should
realise that this deficit should be reduced to the minimum, if not eliminated
entirely. I can, however, show you how it’s done, and how your budget can be
converted to a surplus budget. I will not charge you anything for my advice. I
only request that the extra money be spent to help save the starving people of Thar. And you might consider
spending a few billion to clean up Karachi (which contributes 96% of Sindh’s revenue).
You
can begin with restaurants. Do you know that there are hundreds of restaurants in Karachi alone whose owners don’t
pay sales tax? Those that are registered with the sales tax department pay only
a token amount which is a few thousand rupees to the government every year.
They can get away with this robbery by bribing your sales tax collection staff heavily.
To increase the revenue from such restaurants (many of which serve more than
five hundred customers a day), all you have to do is to hire honest people to
monitor the sales of these restaurants.
Obviously,
you can’t ask your sales tax department personnel to do so, since they are
already taking millions from the restaurant owners to look the other way. I
suggest that you hire eunuchs who are erroneously called ‘transvestites’ to do the job. They should be
persuaded to stop begging, and you can employ them to report how many customers eat daily
at the restaurants in the province. This data can be compared with that
submitted by the restaurant owners. You will be shocked at the large scale
evasion of sales tax, if you don’t know that already. I’m sure the
eunuchs will do a better job than Sindh government employees, and the
amount recovered as sales tax from restaurants will increase to at least 25
times of what is collected today.
Coming
to the most lucrative of them all; the property sector. Of course you must have some idea
of the loot and plunder going on in the sale and purchase
of property in Karachi. Your predecessor took over the Karachi Building Control
Authority (KBCA) and renamed it the
Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA), so that the taxes recovered from this
sector would not be spent on Karachi. Out of the 25 directors in this
authority, 21 are working in Karachi.
The
price of a 500-square yard plot in Karachi is Rs70 million (equivalent to
Rs140, 000 per square yard). However, the value fixed by your government (known
as District Collector (DC) value) is only Rs1,980 per
square yard. Your government therefore receives only Rs49, 500 as tax and stamp
duty instead of Rs3,500,000 (which would have been the tax, if levied on the
actual price). So, every time a 500-square yard plot in Karachi changes hands,
the government loses Rs3,450,500.
Since
hundreds of transactions take place in Karachi every day, the Sindh government loses billions every year. My
estimate is Rs500 billion at least, if not more. If the DCs don’t know the
actual value of properties, they can visit web sites like zameen.com, and they
will get a good idea of the quantum of taxes the property sector mafia is
evading. And if the DCs refuse to levy taxes on the actual property values, you
can conclude that they too are in collusion with the mafia and making millions
every year.
Sir, if you do what I have
suggested, you will be able to change the face of Sindh. Please, for once do
the right thing, don’t be afraid of those who will be affected. Stop the loot
and plunder, recover the due taxes from these two sectors and soon Sindh will
become the richest province in the country.
Engineer,
former visiting lecturer at NED Engineering College, industrialist, associated
with petroleum/chemical industries for many years. Loves writing, and (in the
opinion of most of those who know him), mentally unbalanced. He tweets
@shakirlakhani (twitter.com/shakirlakhani)
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/51604/dear-murad-ali-shah-do-you-even-know-what-sindhs-tax-collectors-are-upto/
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