*ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is considering to impose tax on offshore digitalcompanies, including tech giants such as Amazon Facebook, and Google inorder to acquire share from earnings of these foreign entities. *

As part of the 2018-19 federal budget, these taxes on foreign digitalcompanies – making earnings through Pakistan – have been proposed beforethe parliament. But at the same time, all such tax proposals have beenrejected by the Senate Standing Committee of Finance, termingit anti-business and anti-investments. The Senate body argued that theproposed move would impact foreign investors negatively.

In a briefing to the standing committee, member Inland Revenue Policy ofthe FBR, Dr. Mohammad Iqbal, said that the government wants to tax thedigital advertising space along with hosting and maintenance of websites totax the revenues of tech companies like Google and Yahoo.

This law will also affect companies doing business in user data and onlinemarketplaces, such as Careem and Uber.

If the proposal is passed by the National Assembly, technology companieswill have to pay 5% tax on money earned from user data or digitaladvertising in Pakistan.

“If the FBR starts taxing the big data, this could undermine Pakistan’sability to get benefit from the digital revolution,” said Dr. MusaddiqMalik, member of the standing committee and spokesman of the prime minister.

The PM’s spokesman also came down hard on the FBR and said that Pakistanwas not a tax-liberal country and its tax laws were drastic.