Staff Correspondent:

The National Board of Revenue (NBR) has selected 15,494 income tax cases for audit through random selection method sensing tax evasion.

In order to ensure complete transparency in the method of selecting income tax returns for audit, the NBR has started the process of selecting income tax returns for audit in a fully-automated manner based on Risk Based Audit Selection Criterion, acaccording to an NBR media release.

To complete this process, the media release says, more time is needed to enter the complete information of all paper returns filed offline in the database.

In order to keep the audit activities moving, 0.5% of the returns of each circle filed for the tax year 2023-24 have been selected for audit by the National Board of Revenue through Random Selection method in a digital manner until a fully automated method is implemented based on Risk Based Audit Selection Criterion.

In order to prevent the same taxpayer’s income tax return from being selected for audit repeatedly, the income tax returns of all taxpayers whose income tax returns were selected for audit in the previous two years have been excluded from the random selection for the 2023-24 tax year.

In this method, a total of 15,494 taxpayers from all tax commissionerates across the country have been selected for the 2023-24 tax year income tax return audit.

Although transparency and impartiality can be ensured in the Random Selection method, some uncertainty remains about the desired results, the NBR said in its media release.

The NBR claims that it is committed to selecting income tax returns for audit in a fully-automated manner based on the risk based audit selection criterion by completing the entry into the database of all paper returns filed offline as soon as possible.

If this work can be fully implemented, it will be possible to collect the desired amount of revenue by ensuring complete transparency, impartiality and effectiveness of the income tax return audit selection process, the media release added.