ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has set up a hybrid civil-military task force aimed at broadening the tax base and digitizing Pakistan’s obsolete tax, The Express Tribune reported.
For comprehensive and end-to-end digitization of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), the Prime Minister has been pleased to constitute a task force on digitalization of FBR with immediate effect, according to a notification issued by the PM’s Office.
According to the Express Tribune, the 10-member task force has one month to design policy interventions for the FBR’s digitalization, including data automation implementation and software solutions.
The Express Tribune reported that PM Shehbaz Sharif has appointed businessmen and information technology experts as the members of the new task force. The newspaper said that Amir Malik, ex-chief executive officer of the Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL) a subsidiary of the FBR has also been made a member of the task force. As per the notification, the task force’s aim will also be data integration, both vertically with provincial Revenue Authorities and horizontally across government ministries as well as departments. The Express Tribune cited the PM’s office as saying that that the task force will be responsible for risk-based auditing with Computerized National Identity Cards as a single primary identifier to broaden the tax base in the South Asian country.
The task force will give suggestions for a track and trace system via an integrated and automated system, the notification said. The task force will also work for the restructuring of PRAL as an independent information technology driven bureau for developing planning data and generating an interface for trade data sharing with trading partners for effective assessment and evaluation.
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A day earlier, Pakistan’s PM had also set up a task force to identify and oversee the implementation of structural reforms in the power sector of Pakistan. The power sector task force will work to decrease the financial burden of the sector being borne by the government and to enable the formation of an efficient, liquid and self-sustaining competitive power market. The power sector task force will work to review affairs about the set-up cost of various Independent Power Producers (IPPs) as well as identify malpractices, procedural weaknesses and regulatory gaps to suggest the way forward to rectify these.
The task force will review the compliance of IPPs with the parameters and terms and conditions of various deals inked with the government and will suggest steps to resolve the issue of circular debt stock in the energy sector.
