Dodging the tax question

Dodging the question is something politicians the world over have refined to a fine art, and few more so than those who are the elected representatives of the people of Pakistan. The question currently being dodged on all sides concerns income taxes — as in how much has been paid and by whom. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is a toothless wonder if ever there was one and is widely ignored by all and sundry. It demands that members of the elected bodies submit details of their assets and tax payments, a requirement few are willing to comply with, despite it being a legal necessity, and those who do actually submit a return are invariably economical with the truth. In an attempt to bring light unto the darkness, a parliamentary body was set up last April to investigate tax evasion in the legislature. To the surprise of absolutely nobody (indeed there will have been surprise in some quarters that the legislature actually decided to investigate its members, affairs), the aforesaid body has crashed and burned on take-off, never having investigated anything.



The 10-member commission was formed with representatives from a range of parties and chaired by Omar Ayub — who was unseated in June 2015 after a prolonged legal battle and who has not been replaced. Headless, the commission is awaiting a formal burial. It had met just three times but talked itself out of a job by deciding that as the Federal Board of Revenue had issued a tax directory of all parliamentarians, it was unnecessary to probe their fiscal activity any further.

This is, of course, stuff and nonsense. There is every reason to take a forensic look at each and every lawmaker in Pakistan, and lay bare for all to see what their assets are, from where they derive their income and what they spend it on. Transparency comes not easily to these agile monkeys, adept as they are at the dodging and weaving, ducking and diving, that goes hand in hand with all manner of corruption and malfeasance — and they have managed to pull the wool over our eyes yet again.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23^rd, 2015.

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