Hassni challenges to bring Dar in Senate body meeting

Islamabad :The Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Revenues Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwala on Wednesday gave challenge to one of his own committee members-- Senator Fateh Mohammad Hassni--for convincing Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar to participate in the Senate panel meetings.

“I assign you to bring him (Ishaq Dar) into Senate Standing Committee meeting as I am [sic] unable to do it in last several years. The minister had just attended two to three meeting in its whole tenure. I could not bring him into meetings here,” the Senate panel Chairman Saleem Mandviwala said while chairing the meeting here at the Parliament House on Wednesday.

Senator Fateh Mohammad Hassni said that he would then sit on the Senate Standing Committee on Finance chairman seat if Mandviwalla became finance minister.   Earlier, FBR Chairman Tariq Pasha told the committee that Ishaq Dar would soon return to Pakistan.

 “God willing, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar will come back to Pakistan,” said Pasha while assuring the Senate Standing Committee on Finance Chairman Senator Saleem Mandviwala.  The issue of Dar’s absence came into the limelight when the FBR chairman stated that the refund payments would only be made after the finance minister gives a date.

The Accountability Court had issued bailable arrest warrants for Ishaq Dar, and NAB also filed an appeal in the Supreme Court for reopening the Hudaibaiya case.  The chairman standing committee also lamented that after becoming finance minister, Ishaq Dar completely ignored the standing committee and hardly attended any of its meetings. He said that he had stopped requesting Dar to attend the meeting because of his indifference to the parliamentary business.

There was a time when a low-cadre officer of the FBR would give taxpayers’ refunds, and we should be ashamed for taking pride over paying refunds by the finance minister and prime minister, Senator Mandviwala said. 

For past four years, the PML-N government used the taxpayers’ refunds for showing performance on account of revenue collection, but it choked the export oriented and other business sectors negatively because they faced liquidity crunch. According to some estimates, the FBR is withholding around Rs250 billion genuine refunds of the taxpayers.

In the first two months of the current fiscal year, the FBR paid back around Rs30 to Rs 36 billion on account of refunds payments, claiming that they issued refunds where Refund Payment Orders (RPOs) were issued after reconciliation for last fiscal year up to April 2017.

But the piled up refunds still remained a major issue for the business tycoons impacting their day to day affairs badly, and the tax machinery will have to take more concrete steps for cleaning its slate once and for all.