Business Recorder
ISLAMABAD: The Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO), Zafar ul Haq Hijazi, has issued a strict order against the Federal Board of Revenue’s (FBR) Sales Tax Wing after the Board’s persistent failure to unlock a provisionally submitted sales tax return caused severe prejudice to a registered taxpayer. It is reliably learnt that FTO directs the Chief Sales Tax (Operations) to immediately resolve the system error on merits and report compliance. READ ALSO: Paying ST without any adjudication proceedings: FBR officials accused of pressuring ST registrants When contacted Azhar Shifique Manj, the CFO of the complainant company told this correspondent that the company had submitted its monthly sales tax return for December 2025 provisionally through the IRIS 2.0 portal. Due to a technical glitch in Annexure-H1 of the IRIS 2.0 portal, wherein invoices were not being fetched, causing a negative figure to appear in the annexure, the return was locked by the system and remained frozen in provisional draft status. As a cascading consequence, the sales tax returns for January 2026 and February 2026 could not be filed and the complainant’s entire sales tax registration was rendered inactive. Despite the complainant submitting a formal written request to the Secretary (ST-Operations), FBR, and making repeated personal visits to the concerned offices, the department took no corrective action whatsoever. No response was filed by department. The Second Secretary who appeared at the hearing on May 25, 2026 could only commit to seeking a report from the field office, Azhar Manj added. The FTO categorically held that neither responding to the written request of the taxpayer, nor rectifying the system error faced during filing of the sales tax return for December 2025 and subsequent months, constitutes maladministration within the meaning of Section 2(3)(i)(a) & (ii) of the FTO Ordinance. Accordingly, FBR has been directed to instruct the Chief Sales Tax (Ops) to resolve the matter on merit. Waheed Shahzad Butt, who appeared for the complainant, spoke candidly about the systemic nature of the problem. He stressed that when a sales tax registration is made inactive as a result of FBR’s own failure to fix a technical error, the taxpayer is effectively stripped of the ability to operate commercially, unable to issue or receive valid tax invoices, barred from input tax adjustments and exposed to penalties for non-filing through no fault of their own. Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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