FBR Press Release

Federal Board of Revenue(FBR) has categorically rebutted the above captioned news item, FBR reels under a major 'cyber attack' published in Express Tribune today as on August 15, 2022. The instant news item sought to create a misleading impression that FBR had shut down its website in anticipation of a possible hacking attack. The scribe of subject news item rather went on to term it 'national emergency situation.' Unfortunately, the said story is based on far-fetched imagination and is obviously miles away from facts.

 

FBR further clarified that it had been publicizing periodically that Iris module launches and upgradation were in progress. National holidays provided appropriate time for IT Wing to upgrade systems, migrate and cleanse data. Thus, the return filing system was taken off-line at 22:00 hours on 13th August, 2022.  However, all revenue generating services were not taken off-line and those remained fully functional. Therefore, Weboc, Pakistan Single Window(PSW) and Point of Sale services remained operational.

 

It is pertinent to mention that around 9000 new GDs were filed from August 13 to 15 noon time while over 11000 GDs were cleared during the same period, resulting in collection of over 12 Billion of duties and taxes at import stage. Likewise, during these two days, over 3.2 million invoices were issued by Tier-1 Retailers integrated with FBR POS System across the country, charging around 1 Billion Sales Tax. These numbers sufficiently testify to the fact that all revenue collection related services remained actively operational in these two days, as against the false assertions made in the subject news item.