The Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) has formally petitioned the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to urgently dismantle a system-level restriction within the IRIS web portal that prevents returning individuals from accurately declaring their opening wealth balances for Tax Year 2026.
In an official letter directed to Zubair Bilal, Member of Inland Revenue – Operations at the FBR, the KTBA outlined severe compliance difficulties stemming from hard-coded system validations. The IRIS portal currently auto-populates a taxpayer’s opening wealth balance utilizing data from their most recently filed Wealth Statement and strictly prohibits any manual edits to that figure.
This digital rigidity creates a critical bottleneck for individuals resuming their resident status in Pakistan after consecutive years of non-residence. Under Section 116(2) of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001, non-residents are not statutorily obligated to file wealth statements during their time abroad. However, when these individuals return and become liable to file for Tax Year 2026, the IRIS system erroneously forces their last recorded closing balance—potentially dating back to June 30, 2023—as their unalterable opening balance for the current tax year.
“The IRIS web portal automatically populates the opening wealth balance from the last Wealth Statement filed and does not allow that balance to be edited.”
KTBA President Muhammad Mehmood Bikiya and Honorary General Secretary Shams Mohiuddin Ansari emphasized that this technical flaw severely compromises the statutory “self-assessment and declaration framework”. By locking the opening balance, the portal actively prevents returning taxpayers from accurately reconciling the movement in their wealth for the active tax year.
The association argued that taxpayers must retain the liberty to declare their opening wealth balance based on updated, relevant financial records upon resuming residency, subject to applicable tax laws.
To resolve the impending filing crisis, the KTBA has formally urged the FBR to modify the specific validation protocols within the IRIS infrastructure. Correcting this systemic flaw would allow returning citizens to enter the appropriate opening balance for Tax Year 2026, enabling accurate statutory compliance without forcing them to manually reconcile financial movements spanning their intervening years of non-residence.