SBP guidelines for digitisation of taxes, duties.

KARACHI -- The State Bank on Thursday issued detailed guidelines for the digitisation of collection of taxes and duties.

The central bank said there were complaints and concerns by the tax payers over low awareness of banks' field staff regarding the Alternate Delivery Channels (ADC) and Over-the Counter (OTC) mechanism.

Issuing the guidelines, the SBP directed banks to ensure that their branches have fully functional OTC system integrated with 1Link to collect government taxes and duties. The branch staff should have full understanding of the system and should facilitate tax payers in payment of taxes, the SBP added.

'While we appreciate the effective role and contribution of banks in making this initiative a huge success, there are still complaints and concerns by the tax payers about low awareness of banks' field staff about the ADC particularly the OTC mechanism,' the central bank said. It advised banks to take measures for digitisation of collecting taxes and duties with immediate priority.

Custom duty is dependent on the exchange rate. Thus, there may be cases where the taxpayer generates Payment Slip ID (PSID) on one day and approaches the bank for payment on another day, the amount of duty reflected on the PSID could be different from the one appearing on bank's terminal, the central bank said.

'In such cases...