The Sindh Government continues to impose Sindh Sales Tax (ranging from 3% TO 13%) on exports of all IT- enabled services from the province, in contrast to Punjab and Federal Capital where no services tax is applicable to the BPO exports. Because of the Sindh Government policies, only 3 out of 10 top BPO and Call Center exporters are in Sindh, as per the current data of reported exports. The BPO exports which showed 26.17% growth for the year ended on 30th June 2020 could have been much higher had Sindh acted upon the requests being made by P@SHA for the past many years.

P@SHA made several presentations to the government over the last several months in various pre-budget consultations with multiple officials in the relevant departments, raising the seriousness of this matter and provided figures to show the government that both Punjab and the Federal Capital have zero-rated all exports of IT and IT-enabled services. P@SHA strongly recommends the use of the same definition of IT and ITES across all provinces as formulated by FBR and used in the Income Tax Ordinance 2001. It has been repeatedly highlighted that this services tax is seriously hurting the growth of ITES exports, as well as employment in the services sector in Sindh and particularly the city of Karachi, is losing out where exports of IT-enabled services & BPO have continued to grow in double digits over the last several years. P@SHA feels that the Sindh government is not serious in promoting the IT industry exports from the province and thus a bottleneck in the creation of thousands of jobs to the youth of the cities of Sindh.