Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue has put its redesigned income tax return for Tax Year 2026 live on the IRIS portal, and filers and the Karachi Tax Bar Association (KTBA) are reporting a run of technical faults as the September 30, 2026 filing deadline approaches.

The return was deployed by Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL) after the FBR issued Change Request Forms reflecting tax measures passed in the federal budget. In a letter sent to FBR Member, Inland Revenue-Operations, Zubair Bilal, KTBA said the draft form had been circulated in May through SRO 835(I)/2026 for comment, but that no final notification had yet been issued under the Income Tax Rules, 2002 even though the form is already available to taxpayers.

A live form without the final notification

KTBA argued that making the form available for filing does not satisfy the legal requirement to formally notify it, and warned the gap could expose taxpayers to later disputes over the status of their returns. The association asked FBR to issue the final notification urgently, fix the identified faults and deploy a corrected version.

Faults taxpayers and advisers are reporting

KTBA's letter lists functional problems members encountered, including:

  • The refund application facility has not been activated for Tax Year 2026.
  • No acknowledgement slip is generated for download after filing.
  • There is no field to record advances paid against property purchases not completed in the tax year.
  • Returns are rejected when partners' profit-sharing percentages do not total exactly 100 percent.
  • Minimum-tax fields under Section 148 are neither auto-calculated nor manually editable.
  • Auto-fetched withholding figures under Section 153(1)(b) show incorrect amounts with no way to correct them.
  • Taxpayers cannot claim tax collected under Section 235 on domestic electricity bills.
  • Revision of Tax Year 2026 returns is blocked despite the 60-day window under Section 114(6).

Separately, ProPakistani reported, citing unnamed sources, that the initial version of the delayed return contained around 500 bugs and that PRAL has since been working through the list.

Fixes FBR says it has already shipped

According to TaxationPk, FBR said in an official update released August 1, 2026, under the message "You spoke. We listened. We fixed," that it had removed the unstructured property error, allowed non-residents to skip the wealth statement where applicable, added a separate immovable property record for non-residents, enabled IBAN entry for foreign accounts, and allowed business capital reporting for associations of persons and companies. The authority said more fixes are under development.

Responding to media queries, an FBR spokesperson defended the return as "operating as designed," describing a move from a static form to a dynamic interface that adapts to each taxpayer's sources of income, a deliberately added immovable-property feature linking property ownership with rental and agricultural income, and simplified capital gains tax calculation.

Filing so far and the September 30 deadline

According to FBR figures cited by ProPakistani, 808,719 income tax returns had been filed as of August 13, 2026, against about 747,050 in the same period last year, though tax collected through returns filed so far was lower than in the corresponding period last year. The report said most technical issues had been resolved after migration from old equipment to new infrastructure, with a reduced number still outstanding.

What to do if the form rejects a return

  • Refresh the IRIS session and reopen the return, because FBR said the August 1 changes are already deployed on the portal.
  • Review the updated return screens for the specific field or section that failed.
  • Report any unresolved error to FBR or PRAL through the IRIS support channel rather than submitting incorrect figures.
  • Keep a dated note of the error and any attempt to file, in case the issue affects the return's status later.
  • Complete and submit the return before September 30, 2026.

The immediate next step for affected filers is to check whether their specific fault persists on the updated IRIS form and, if it does, to raise it with FBR before the September 30 deadline. What the available reports do not yet establish is the full itemised list of remaining faults or FBR's official count of resolved versus outstanding issues; the roughly 500-bug figure comes from unnamed sources, and FBR has not published its own defect log or a confirmed date for the final notification of the form.