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Tuesday March 19, 2024

FBR to hire prosecutors on market rate in benami cases

By Mehtab Haider
March 22, 2019

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has decided to hire prosecutors on market based salaries in order to contest benami cases before the superior judiciary of the country, The News has learnt.

Where billions of rupees are involved in benami cases, the FBR will hire those who have experience in prosecution.

“Under the proposed reform package pending before the federal cabinet, the FBR has proposed to hire prosecutors to strengthen its benami cases on market based salaries on term of three years period,” top official sources at FBR confirmed to The News here on Thursday.

The FBR is expected that high profile cases against influential on account of benami charges will require strong team who should be capable enough to contest its cases before the superior judiciary and other subordinate relevant forums in highly effective manner. In the last cabinet meeting, the FBR’s reform plan was part of the agenda, but it could not be approved because of paucity of time, said one top official of the FBR. He said that the FBR also proposed to hire consultants for certain specific areas where required instead of hiring private members into the fold of the tax machinery.

“We are going to hire procurement experts as well because these areas are considered as our weak points,” said the official.

The FBR is eyeing to get $400 million loan from the World Bank on the name of bringing reforms into the tax collection machinery, but experts are extending warning that any such reform programme must be devised keeping in view the reasons for failing in last WB funded Tax Administration Reform Project (TARP) during the Musharraf-Aziz regime. As the World Bank had provided loan of $124 million and DFID provided grants of around $25 million, so the overall funding had slashed down from $149 million to $102 million, but it largely remained failed to bring any desired changes into the FBR.

The World Bank had itself declared it moderately unsatisfactory in its findings but now the FBR authorities said that the WB funded programme would depend upon home grown strategy instead of dictating prescriptions based on experience of others.

Although, the government has not yet made up its final mind for seeking $400 million loan to reform the FBR, but the discussions were still on among the party ranks and parliamentarians belonging to PTI that there was need of introducing another tax amnesty scheme for owners of foreign assets, but the FBR opposed on the pretext that such schemes failed to make any real difference and any future scheme might face the same fate. The FBR sources said that in case of going back into the IMF programme the possibility of any amnesty scheme fades away because both the IMF and WB opposed any such proposal tooth and nail.

To another query about the next fiscal year’s FBR target, they said that the IMF mission chief would be visiting Pakistan next week, and they would make an argument in front of Fund team that the FBR’s collection target could be envisaged 20 percent higher in next fiscal year but expecting 40 to 50 percent increase would be hard to achieve because the economy was not in a condition to achieve such a higher target.