Taxman knocking on doors of evaders

KUALA LUMPUR: Some 100 Inland Revenue Board (IRB) officers are knocking on the doors of companies in the Klang Valley who failed to submit their income tax returns.

The “awareness campaign” will see the officers visit 108 companies which did not submit their return forms between 2012 and 2014.

IRB deputy chief executive officer Datuk Sabin Samitah said in most cases, these companies had either folded or were deliberately trying to avoid paying taxes.

“Our approach this year is to look for cases where the companies did not submit but we later found out through third parties that they are still running or have received contracts.

“Because we have limited resources, we made sure that the cases we choose will have a ‘return of investment’. We don’t want to visit and not find anything.

“We are confident we are going to get something from these companies,” he said.

Sabin said the IRB hoped to understand why these companies did not return their forms because they usually had their own auditors and tax agents.

“There’s really no reason for them to forget to send back their forms to us,” he told reporters here yesterday.

In 2012, IRB submitted 357,000 tax returns to companies and only received 274,000 back. In 2013, it sent out 388,000 but only 245,000 came back.

When e-filing started in 2014, it received 281,000 forms from companies. The IRB estimated that about 30% of companies were not filing their returns.

Sabin also said a large number of artistes had come forward to declare their income tax after warnings from the IRB.

Meetings, he added, had been held with artiste associations and professional bodies to get their members to pay up, and some even visited IRB branches around the country.

This came after the board announced in February that it was going after professionals, particularly artistes, doctors and lawyers who had been evading taxes.

Income tax evaders, said Sabin, faced a penalty of up to 300% of what they owed in undisclosed taxes, adding that the IRB would reduce these fines to as low as 15% if people came clean by the end of the year.