The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has dismissed 29 officials from civil service on charges of inefficiency and misconduct in the past one year, including seven officers, amid resistance from within the tax machinery and the politicians to an ongoing cleansing move.
The authorities have started making some progress on disciplinary cases - some of them have been pending for more than eight years due to strong backing that these allegedly corrupt officers receive from within the system.
The FBR’s integrity drive that was limited to only the low-grade staff till a year ago has finally targeted high-ranked officers despite resistance from within the headquarters, according to the sources.
The FBR’s data showed that since July last year, it had dismissed 29 officials from service. These include one grade-20 officer, two grade-19 officers, four grade-18 officers and 15 grade-16 officials, according to the official record.
There were also seven low-grade officers who were removed by their respective heads and appealed to FBR Member Administration Mohammad Bakhtiar. But their appeals were dismissed by the member administration. There are about 156 disciplinary cases that have been pending for years despite a commitment by Prime Minister Imran Khan to weed out corrupt people from the FBR.
In most cases, the charges of corruption and inefficiency have been proved against these officials. Some of them have obtained stay orders and others have used their connections to avoid a major penalty of dismissal from service.
One dismissal case in grade 21, five in grade 20, nine in grade 19, 10 in grade 18, 11 in grade 17 and 120 in grade 16 are pending for final decision.
A summary for removal from service of one grade-21 officer is pending with the Establishment Division for onward transmission to the Prime Minister’s Office, according to the FBR officials.
The officer has used all connections to save his skin and has so far successfully managed to avoid dismissal from service. Similarly, another grade-21 officer has managed to reduce the punishment on charges of concealment of assets made through undisclosed sources from dismissal to just “censure”, the FBR officials told The Express Tribune.
They said that the law ministry was also not cooperating to return the two officers who had serious credibility issues but were serving in the appellate tribunals.
Sources said that some notorious officers who were working in the field were still getting support from the FBR headquarters.
Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin was currently reviewing the options to bring some changes to the FBR headquarters, said the sources. They said that this time around Tarin was making his own choices and was not relying much on the advice from others. There were also attempts to replace the FBR member IR operations, being responsible for the majority of tax collection. But sources said that Tarin was keen to retain him.
During a meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance in June, Tarin had said that he would like to continue with the same team in the FBR.
On July 23, the FBR transferred Muhammad Ali, a BS-20 officer of Inland Revenue Service from the post of Commissioner-IR (Legal), Corporate Tax Office, Karachi and posted him as Chief (IR-Formations), IR-Operations Wing, FBR headquarters.
However, the officer had refused to relinquish the charge, prompting the headquarters to issue his relieving orders on Wednesday.
The FBR’s other affairs have also gone haywire and in an unprecedented move it got stay orders from various courts to stop the constitutional office - the Federal Tax Ombudsman - from inspecting its offices on complaints of malpractices and low recovery of taxes in the offshore asset cases.
The FBR secured stay orders from Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar and Sindh courts in the past few weeks, including two stay orders against the FTO decision to inspect the Karachi and Islamabad Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) zones.
The other stay orders were related to the domestic tax cases being handled by Lahore, Faisalabad, Islamabad, Peshawar and Karachi offices.
Due to complaints of “malpractices with corrupt motives”, the FTO office had taken a suo motu notice and launched a probe to determine as to why FBR’s three field offices were failing the prime minister and the nation in the recovery of presumably $200 billion stashed abroad.
PM Khan had promised to recover the $200 billion worth of looted money.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 6th, 2021.
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