The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) is facing mounting pressure as it struggles to meet its tax collection targets, with income tax return filings lagging far behind last year’s numbers and technical issues worsening the situation.
As of September 30, only 3.2 million income tax returns had been filed, less than half of the 7.7 million returns submitted for the previous tax year. The shortfall comes at a critical time, as the FBR races to achieve its ambitious first-quarter revenue target of Rs. 3.083 trillion.
The situation has been made worse by repeated technical disruptions. On Monday, the FBR’s IRIS portal, used nationwide for filing tax returns, remained inaccessible for most of the day. The outage left taxpayers and tax practitioners unable to submit returns for Tax Year 2025, sparking urgent calls from professional bodies and tax consultants for an extension of the filing deadline.
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The Lahore Tax Bar Association (LTBA) raised the alarm in a letter to the Finance Minister, warning that the IRIS portal’s downtime could lead to widespread non-compliance through no fault of taxpayers. “Tax practitioners and taxpayers were unable to file income tax returns due to the outage,” the LTBA stated, urging authorities to address the issue and extend the deadline.
Meanwhile, the FBR has extended deadlines for tax-free sugar imports and for traders to implement real-time electronic sales tax reporting, further highlighting ongoing challenges in tax administration.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also pressed the FBR to show concrete progress on its transformation plan, which was approved last year by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif with over Rs. 55 billion in funding. The plan aims to modernize tax administration and boost collections, but the FBR’s persistent struggles, both technical and operational, underscore the scale of the task ahead.
