The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has received the required clearance chit from intelligence to post and transfer its senior officers, high-level sources informed ProPakistani.
The tax machinery has received input from the Directorate of Intelligence and Investigation (I&I) Inland Revenue (IR) on the transfer and posting of Inland Revenue Service (IRS) officers.
This clearance chit from the I&I IR directorates also raises questions about the identical exercise conducted in March this year, i.e. whether the previous exercise conducted was deficient on some counts.
In March this year, on the directions of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the intelligence agencies were tasked to properly catalog positions of senior officers of FBR in A, B, C, and D categories based on their financial integrity and professional competence.
As a result, some four dozen officers of BS-21 of both Inland and Customs service were placed in the admin pool and the most prominent of them all was an officer of BS-21 who was honored with Tamgha e Imtiaz by the government on 23rd March this year, just one month before he was placed in the admin pool.
And then in July, the government again placed almost two dozen more BS 20 FBR officers in the admin pool. However, all these officers are still waiting for any charge sheet to be issued against them, even after the lapse of almost six months. Sources said that reforms have always been going on in the tax body for the past decades and every time, human resource management was at the top of such agendas.
A similar exercise was conducted in 2000 when almost 1,000 officials of FBR were suspended and handed over charge sheets by President Pervez Musharraf’s government on allegations of “having the reputation of being corrupt”. But all of them were later reinstated by the superior judiciary of the country.
In 2007, all the officers/officials were again put under integrity scrutiny when the entire FBR and its field formations were reformed and a special pay package was introduced.
Sources said that as a result of the present exercise which started in March this year, junior officers have to be posted as the head of field formations because professional and integrity-wise okayed officers are few.
Even the work of Appellate Tribunal Inland Revenue is suffering because of a shortage of members but despite having agreed with the Law Division, FBR has not been able to recommend a panel of officers as members of ATIR after the lapse of so many months, sources added.
However, after this exercise, some of the placements made by Chairman FBR in the recent past are still open to question. This is creating a lot of despondency among the rank and file of FBR due to which it is facing the highest-ever shortfall of over Rs. 350 billion in the first five months of FY25.
Sources added that the March 2024 exercise poses many questions for the present government as to what parameters have been given to intelligence agencies to gauge the financial and professional integrity of FBR manpower and their grading among A-D categories and if this exercise is needed for tax bureaucracy, then, why it is not being replicated in other service groups.
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