Islamabad: Finance Minister, Senator Mohammad Ishaq Dar, has shown his satisfaction on the provisional revenue collection figures for the quarter ended 30th September 2017, and has expressed confidence that the same trend shall continue and the entire team of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) would not leave any stone unturned for achievement of assigned target during the remaining part of the fiscal year.
Chairman FBR briefed the Finance Minister on the revenue collection effort and informed that the Board has clocked an unprecedented provisional revenue collection of over Rs. 765 billion for the first quarter of the fiscal year by recording an increase of more than 20% over the revenue collected during the corresponding period of last fiscal year. The provisional collection for the month of September 2017 shows an increase of 20% over the collection for September 2016 which depicts a substantial improvement over the growth of 0.8% registered in the monthly collection last year. During fiscal year 2016-17, the collection for the first quarter stood at Rs. 634 billion as against the figure of Rs. 765 billion collected this year.
During September 2017, according to the provisional figures received so far, FBR has made a net collection of more than Rs. 315 billion as against Rs. 263 billion collected during September 2016. The revenue collection trend during the first three months of the financial year augurs well for the efforts of FBR towards achievement of the assigned annual revenue targets.
The Finance Minister was informed that, contrary to certain press reports based on unconfirmed and unreliable sources, FBR has achieved quarterly growth of over 20% during July-September 2017, whereas the required annual growth for achieving the assigned target was 19.4%. To put the performance in perspective, it may be noted that the growth of over 20% over the corresponding period of the previous fiscal year has been recorded against 6.6% growth achieved during July-September 2016 over the corresponding period of fiscal year 2015-16. The increase in growth of revenue collection becomes even more impressive when viewed in context of an increase of more than 110% in the amount of refunds issued in the first quarter of the current year as compared to the first quarter of the preceding year.
