The taxman cometh

KARACHI: A few weeks ago, I received a notice from my taxman. The stated penalty for not presenting their voluminous requirements within the stipulated 10 days was an ex-parte assessment. Any idiot who pays tax in this country knows what that means. Three visitations later there was no consequential discrepancy in my accounts. In our gentlemanly wearing down negotiations, I suggested that they had neither the conviction nor the guts to go after the increasing list of non-tax payers and recommended my somewhat radical formulas for the purpose. On their part they acknowledged my stand and happily advised that I, one of a million-odd turkeys in hand, was presently worth more than all the buzzards around parliament. So, it boiled down to one of two things. Either I contributed to improving the quality of poor taxmen’s lives or I would be assessed ‘on the merits of the case!’ Knowing full well that “Meerit, sain, is only a town in India!”, we settled amicably and promised to meet again, on their turf, in the future!

It thus gives me and the million odd taxpaying turkeys – on whom the leaders and mullahs and taxmen of Pakistan celebrate Thanksgiving – considerable pain on reading recently in the paper that the, “PM, 25 ministers do not pay any income tax”. Given the hand we seem to have dealt ourselves it seems fairly obvious that improvement will not happen in my lifetime. With due credit to and thanks for the herculean efforts of the superior judiciary, it would seem that unless an Ataturk falls from the trees to implement decrees, fake degrees and other forms of buzzards will be the increasing norm and we turkeys will continue our, perhaps already unstoppable, descent into hell. Since I already do pay considerably more than my fair share for their upkeep I most certainly support sacked minister Abdul Qayyum Jatoi’s contention that all should happily share in corruption.

Dr Mervyn Hosein

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2010.