PAC meeting: MPs demand ‘expose’ of all tax evaders

Khawaja Asif of PML-N demands details of assets belonging to FBR officials be made public.

ISLAMABAD:

The Public Accounts Committee  (PAC) has ordered tax authorities to ‘name and shame’ tax evaders across the board so that they can ‘share the embarrassment’ faced by parliamentarians, many of whom were recently exposed in a report as never having filed their tax returns.

In a charged meeting of the PAC held on Wednesday, members took the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) chief to task, for the board’s inability to protect the private tax details of parliamentarians. PAC chairperson Nadeem Afzal Chan ordered the FBR to send notices to all tax defaulters and publish their names within the next 10 days, “So they can also face embarrassment like the parliamentarians”.

Khawaja Muhammad Asif of PML-N demanded that the details of assets belonging to FBR officials should also be made public like those of legislators, saying that people may then come to know who was making money out of smuggling in the guise of the Afghan transit trade. He alleged that smuggling worth $1.5 billion took place annually, and that the money was equally divided between businessmen and FBR officials. No FBR official denied the allegations.

A recent investigative report by the Centre for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan disclosed that more than two-thirds of the parliamentarians do not pay taxes. The report stated that Asif paid only Rs81,374 in taxes in the financial year 2010-11. Hamid Yar Hiraj of the PML demanded that the FBR should also disclose the names of media house owners who are evading taxes, and who do not deposit taxes they deduct from employees’ salaries.

FBR Chairperson Ali Arshad Hakeem said parliamentarians should use the opportunity to broaden an extremely narrow tax base instead of punishing whistleblowers. He said if Parliament wanted the tax details of bureaucrats and media houses to be made public, it needed to amend existing income tax laws.

The FBR chief said Pakistan’s tax to Gross Domestic Product ratio is 9.1% -- below that of Gabon and Sierra Leone.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 3^rd, 2013.