Punjab, K-P announce innovation fund

April 30 set as deadline for submission of applications

LAHORE: The Sub-National Governance Programme (SNG) launched its first round of the Innovation Challenge Fund (ICF) to support the governments of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) in improving public finance management and expanding fiscal space.

The programme has invited applications from both private and public sectors to put forth innovative ideas on public financial management and fiscal space that would help generate more revenue and refine financial management in Punjab and K-P.

The applications can be submitted online till April 30.

The selected themes for Punjab include developing an end to end e-procurement solution for the provincial government, modern techniques to enhance collection of taxes (such as use of geographic information system (GIS), Google Maps and Google Car to increase coverage of property tax), and integration of different data bases of tax-payers for holistic management of enforcement (Data integration of businesses registered with Punjab Employees Social Security Institution, Labour Department, Punjab Revenue Authority, etc).

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The fund shall also support automation of tax payment and license fees at different levels and expansion of the current e-payment system of the provincial government (local government taxes, fees, water charges, among others), an analytics system that could use Project to Improve Financial Reporting and Auditing (PIFRA) data to generate effective budget reports and capture detailed expenditures linked to sustainable development goals (SDGs) and automating information from PC-Is for estimating implications for future current budget, and innovative ideas for disaster risk financing, planning and disbursement.



For K-P, the selected themes include geographic information system (GIS) mapping of properties and services for determining true tax value, determining tax potential and mechanism of e-commerce and business transactions under the digital economy among other themes meant to strengthen information available with the government.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th, 2020.