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CREST—FBR’s software to facilitate taxpayers

FBR is capturing transactions by registered persons to identify where a registered person is denied benefit admissible under the Sales Tax Act. Accordingly, FBR has developed Computerised Risk-based Evaluation of Sales Tax (CREST) software that checks information in monthly returns, import / export data and cross matches for every registered person. Exceptions that emerge will be conveyed electronically to registered taxpayers who in turn can explain the position to FBR by using CREST and attaching their supporting documents.
The CREST system has in-built capacity to verify the veracity of reply received from the registered person. CREST system is designed for Sales Tax and is based on declarations and covers following areas:
1. Purchases including Input tax adjustment of buyers and suppliers.
2. Zero Rated Sales to registered person with non-active ATL or blacklisted or suspended Sales Tax Registration Numbers (STRNs).
3. Section 8B-exemption-claims against qualifying criteria per notification.
4. Exports claim in returns which do not match with Customs export data.
5. Commercial Imports by non-manufactures who also do not show value addition on imports.   
Introductory workshops were held in Lahore and Karachi. The system is in test-stage and messages to 1,000 sales tax payers have already been sent by FBR alerting them to discrepancies detected in their cases. The features of this new system are:
• CREST allows faster and timely sending of discrepancy-alerts to taxpayers. CREST also provides taxpayers an IT system that they can use in order to reply to the CREST discrepancy-alerts without taxpayer needing to visit the tax offices.
• CREST use by taxpayers is an optional-facility and taxpayers can ignore it and make an in-person visit to tax office to explain his position regarding the discrepancy-alert.