Action plan: FBR to help NACTA choke terror funding

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar recommended the move

ISLAMABAD:

In its bid to smother financial funding of terrorists, the interior minister has now co-opted the country’s premier auditing, tax enforcing and collecting body, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), senior officials say.

The FBR has been declared a key ‘associate’ for the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta), which the government is building as a platform for technical and intelligence inputs on countering terrorism.

According to State Bank (SBP) Governor Ashraf Wathra, a recommendation to this effect was recently made by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar who heads a subcommittee on choking terror financing under National Action Plan (NAP) Implementation Committee.

“As the measures taken to prevent money laundering are not sufficient in the fight against terrorist financing, they have to be supplemented by special measures prescribed by competent international bodies,” suggested the committee on terror financing.

But Wathra noted that the government needed more time to finalise these recommendations.

He added that the committee deliberated on better coordination between provincial and federal agencies and departments calling it critical for improving the counter terrorism-financing regime.

The move comes after the government had established a National Terrorists Financing Investigation Cell (NTFIC) to curb terror funding. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar had tasked FIA, SBP, FBR and intelligence agencies to jointly operate the Ntfic to track the flow of funds between national and international banking systems.

Nisar had recently confessed before the lower house of Parliament that the government’s performance on combating terror financing was slow and that the Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) was insufficient.

“With the existing system [FMU], we cannot stop terror funding,” Nisar had said. Terming the fight against terror financing as imperative to attain the desired results under NAP, he added, “This is difficult but not impossible.”

Experts say tracking terror financing is far more difficult than other monetary crimes such as money laundering – which is almost always preceded by an unlawful activity hence aiding detection. Terror financing, however, may come from completely legal sources.

Wathra said that terrorism financing usually involves small amounts which do not need to be reported to the anti-money laundering office, allowing it to pass under the radar.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2016.