ISLAMABAD : A faulty revenue collection strategy has cost the national exchequer Rs 700 billion in FY25. A number of factors are cause of leakages in tax collection like corruption, mismanagement and decision-makers self-made loopholes meant to benefit selected tax payers and get share in return as booty from evaded- taxes’ money. Over and above these a few factors, non-implementation of QR-Code for plugging in tax evasion of hundreds of billions taxes is a major reason in tax evasion in Pakistan.
Some major industries of Pakistan are reportedly involved in massive tax evasion and its entire details have already been shared with the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) by Iskandar M. Khan, a prominent industrialist of Pakistan and president Polypropylene Association of Pakistan.
Mr Iskandar M Khan had proposed to FBR many years ago to implement QR-Code system for all major industries to check leakages in taxes, but a strong lobby within FBR put this proposal in the dust bin.
Interestingly, when many other voices also joined Iskandar M. Khan to force FBR to use QR-Code to check tax pilferages by large manufacturing units of Pakistan, FBR’s corrupt lobby brought in a sticker made QR-Code, which hardly had any affect or traceability. FBR’s corrupt lobby intentionally confused original idea of implementing QR-Code with a sticker based code to create an impression that FBR has put in place the very idea of QR-Code as was demanded by some honest businessmen of Pakistan including Iskandar M. Khan. But, in fact, the use of sticker code rather than QR-Code was a ploy to help tax evading industrialists enjoying stealing taxes as long as they want. QR-Code could give real time products’ details and bring tax evasion to almost zero whereas sticker code deletes itself during products’ packing due to process heat and hence remains untraceable.
FBR lobby whose interest was to make money and help selected industries make money through tax evasion is dodging the system very successfully. FBR chairman, Rashid Langerial is working hard to defeat corrupt lobby of FBR officials, but he too has failed to understand how corrupt FBR officials’ lobby is managing to foil systems like QR-Code to promote corruption in tax system and get some portion of money they get from cunning businessmen/ industrialists for its services to steal taxes.
According to the World Bank and some other donors’ report, Pakistan is losing Rs 700 billion annually in taxes.
These donors and Pakistan’s development partners like the World Bank and Asian Bank are highlighting scale of corruption in Pakistan’s corrupt tax system, but FBR corrupt lobby manages to cover all reports of these financial institutions through different tactics to keep helping cunning tax evading industrialists for pocketing their share from stolen taxes.
Iskandar M. Khan has made another daring attempt and proposed an innovative strategy to FBR chairman , Rashid Langerial , to help FBR stop tax evasion and help Pakistan enhance its per capita tax ratio. Its like two- plus- two that Pakistan can not get out of IMF and other lenders’ trap unless it improves its revenue collection . Even a layman know that its only possible if FBR gets rid of corruption within its ranks.
FBR chairman , Rashid Langerial, must take Iskandar M. Khan’s new proposals seriously and implement them to meet his daunting task of getting monstrous tax collection revenue for FY26. Here are the proposals:
