KARACHI: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has initiated an exercise, and seeking feedback from the stakeholders including industrialists and exporters regarding the utility of export facilitation schemes.
Through this exercise FBR aims to determine whether the export facilitation scheme is trade-friendly and simple to avail; evaluate whether the scheme is contributing to promotion of exports; remove bottlenecks, if any, on the way of smooth implementation of this scheme and check whether the deficiencies (if any), in the form of loose controls, are causing any revenue loss.
It may be mentioned here the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has already reduced documentary and data requirements for Customs clearance in compliance with the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA).
Pakistan has also kick-started the process of establishing an integrated digital platform named the National Single Window (NSW) to facilitate traders in filing import and export documents at one place instead of 42 places and reduce the consignment clearance time at ports to hours from days at present.
Pakistan’s ranking has improved 29 notches to 142nd place out of 190 economies in the area of trading across borders.
The new Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government is also in the process of finalising measures that it intends to take to increase exports and contain the ballooning import bill.
The government expects new measures to result in over 18% increase in exports to $29.4 billion in the current fiscal year.