No place to hide: Tax evasion getting difficult gradually, says Dar

Pakistan will start sharing financial data of citizens with OECD members from 2018

KARACHI: Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has said that the government is gradually making tax evasion difficult and in coming months it will be further difficult to move undeclared assets from one country to another.

He said this while talking to a large gathering of business community at the head office of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) on Friday.

“Pakistan is fast changing its system and tax evasion is not going to be easy,” he warned.

On September 14, 2016, Pakistan became 104th member of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) convention on mutual administrative assistance in tax matters.

From 2018 onwards, Pakistan would be sharing financial data of its citizens with all OECD member-countries, which meant that anybody who invested in any of these states would have to come clean, he added.

Dar said the federal government was not overly relying on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to generate energy.

“We are also pushing ahead with many power projects with our own investments and Pakistan will be a load-shedding-free country by the end of 2018,” he added.

Listing down the successes of his government, he said the economy was now stable and Pakistan should grow faster in the next two years. The ease of doing business should also improve in coming months, he emphasised.

Experts believed that Pakistan would be the 18th largest economy by 2050, he said, adding “if we keep our economic policies on the right track, then Pakistan can achieve this target much before, like in 2030.”

Amnesty scheme

FPCCI President Zubair Tufail requested the finance minister to prepare a final amnesty scheme for those Pakistanis who had billions of rupees worth of assets outside Pakistan and who wanted to bring them in the country.

“The business community knows that the government is considering an amnesty scheme so that people can declare their assets by paying 3% to 5% of the total amount to the government,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 21^st, 2017.

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