KARACHI (January 24 2003) : The Senior Tax Administration Adviser, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Richard Highfield and Head, Tax Policy and Administration Thematic Group, World Bank (WB), Michael Engelschalk have expressed their complete satisfaction over the restructuring of CBR tax administration.
Both the IMF and WB officials commented that they were greatly impressed by the establishment of Large Taxpayers Unit (LTU) and termed it an extremely positive development in the overall reform process of the CBR tax administration.
The officials who were on a visit of Large Taxpayers Unit to evaluate the timeline of CBR pertaining to the restructuring on Thursday said that they had a wide experience of similar tax reforms in Europe, Russia, and Middle East countries. Therefore, comparing the LTU facility with other countries they found it as good as any other tax office in the world.
They also said that the experience of CBR in establishing LTU at Karachi will be very relevant in establishing such facilities in other cities of Pakistan.
They emphasised that the reform measures also contained a major step in training of tax collectors and development of their performance measures.
They were informed that such training programmes would be introduced for the CBR officers including tax collectors of LTU.
After having a detailed round of the facility they were briefed on all aspects, ranging from the objectives of the creation of the LTU, the functional distribution of work and the matrix organisation to the open architecture of the office to bring in change in the service attitude of officials.
In an extensive session of six hours, the officers at LTU individually conferred with the officials of IMF and WB on the subject of reform measures of CBR.
The IMF and WB officials also held meetings with the representatives of the Tax Bar Association, Overseas Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Chartered Accountant Firms.
Each group gave its opinion on the reforms process of CBR and highlighted the difficulties they were likely to face during transition phase.
The team also visited the Model Sales Tax House where they were briefed on the renovation and plan to house the two collectorates of sales tax in the same building.
