The National Board of Revenue (NBR) will ask all holders of taxpayer identification numbers to re-register with additional details, in a bid to update its database for full automation
The move comes as the tax authority's existing database became mired in defects such as duplicate and fake TINs and holding of more than one TIN by a single person.
The procedure for TIN issuance is manual, and many numbers were given out without proper inspection of the supporting documents, an NBR official said.
The manual system also barred the tax officials from checking whether the person already had a TIN issued by other tax zones.
The problem grew after the tax administration changed its past practice of issuing TINs from the headquarters in 2002 and authorised its field offices from doing so.
“Following the decentralisation, the NBR did not get adequate info of TIN holders to keep its database updated,” the NBR official said.
Of the 35 lakh-odd TIN holders, the NBR has information of 18 lakh at its central database, according to the official.
The NBR field offices have already started sending letters to the TIN holders asking them re-register to their respective tax circles.
The tax authority is yet to decide, though, on whether to issue new TIN to cancel out the old one, added the NBR official.
"We expect taxpayers to take it sportingly and provide the info so that we can move towards the automation of revenue administration," Rahela Choudhury, member-in-charge of NBR's ICT, told The Daily Star.
The taxmen said the revenue administration would examine the existing TINs with the Election Commission's database.
The data matching would ensure that an individual taxpayer has only one TIN, which would then serve as the foundation for automation.
Earlier in 2009, the NBR decided to update the TIN database with support from the World Bank's arm International Finance Corporation, but the project never took off.
Later, the NBR decided to go on its own and update the TIN database by June next year, to fulfil one of the IMF conditions tagged with the $1.0 billion credit, said the official.