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Govt violates FBR Act: former chairman
Sunday, July 05, 2009
By Mehtab Haider
ISLAMABAD: The government has violated the FBR Act by giving additional charge of Secretary Revenue Division to Secretary Finance Salman Siddiq, which will affect the autonomy of the prime tax collecting agency of the country, former Federal Board of Revenue chairman Abdullah Yousuf said.
“Definitely, the government has violated the FBR Act,” Yousuf said at a conference on ‘privatisation with public-private partnership’. “This step has given the incumbent FBR chairman the status of additional secretary to the finance ministry.”
He was quite disturbed over the recent move made by the top management of the tax collecting agency under which they increased the number of members up to 12, which he said was against the spirit of planned reforms according to which the number of members should be cut to six. “The government has reversed the whole reform process by hiring private members in the FBR,” he added.
“Now vacant posts have been filled by making a unique arrangement which is basically aimed at removing differences between income tax and customs officers,” he added.
He said the FBR had potential to edge up revenue collection from the existing taxable sector by Rs600 billion which means tax collection could go up to Rs1,700 billion from Rs1,150 billion collected in 2008-09. He said tax officers got powers in order to resume the exercise of the past under which taxpayers were harassed which would result into filling of their own pockets but the national kitty would be suffered.
Answering a query about Pakistan Customs Computerized System (PaCCs), he said a strong lobby is against PaCCs owing to apparent reasons as this system has blocked their ways to fill their pockets. “The vested interest always hinders the way of doing good things in our country in all departments,” he added.
He said it was thoroughly planned to gradually implement the PaCCS in a systematic manner. Therefore, valuation module and risk-management module were planned to be updated under PaCCS replication at other ports. Unfortunately, PaCCS development team was disintegrated and transferred to sales tax and other departments.
He also disclosed that when the FBR had decided to get automated system for custom clearance it was also proposed to the FBR from the World Bank to get ASYCUDA as free of cost but its configuration as well as minor changes required consultant services and hefty amount required to run this system uninterrupted.
“We also found that the ASYCUDA was not able to meet our requirements as its many systems were run manually,” he added. At that time, it has been found that “ASYCUDA” would not fulfill the requirements of the Pakistani customs clearance systems. “We needed a full-fledged automated system for clearance of consignments, whereas “ASYCUDA” had some manual components which were not appropriate for the fully automated customs clearance system.
“Being FBR chairman at that time, it was a conscious decision of the board-in-council to go for “PaCCS” instead of “ASYCUDA” keeping in view all aspects of the clearance systems,” he added. He was of the view that the FBR reform process has been reversed by taking anti-reform steps in the field formations. Under reforms, the tax policy would be framed at the board level, whereas operational matters have to be done by the field formations. Now, it seemed that the operational matters are also been done by the FBR through appointment of FBR member operations.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
