The season of budget seminars and setting targets for growth and exports to bridge ever widening gap between “Tax to GDP” is alive. This has been an exercise in futility for past three decades, setting utopian targets without enforcement of financial discipline and an effective powerful direct tax collection system which punishes tax evasion, considered a crime against state in developing countries.
Unless there is political will, exhibited by present ruling elite leading by example, this is all a waste of time. Name one year in past three decades where FBR direct tax collection targets have been achieved and failure to accomplish targets penalised? More revenue has been wasted in advertising tax amnesty schemes than tax collection from them.
A country that bases its budget upon foreign remittances, rather than tax collection and rise in exports and growth in socio economic sectors is a nation destined to doom and gloom. In presence of laws where individuals are allowed to transfer through banking channels, almost equivalent received through foreign remittances by expatriate workers, there is bound to be an ever growing deficit. This has lead to more debts with country caught in this viscous cycle of taking more loans to pay back debts, putting at stake state sovereignty. Today almost every paid public office holder involved in making policy decisions which decide fate of millions has a conflict of interest, with no stakes in this country. In 1947 Quaid through a political struggle managed to free us from foreign occupation which started with Robert Clive’s East India Company, only to be replaced within few years of Jinnah’s death with a new East India Company managed by brown natives who have pledged an oath of loyalty to foreign countries, or those who have no faith in this country which they consider worthy only to rule, but unfit for their families to live in or their assets to be located here.
Malik Tariq
Lahore
