ISLAMABAD, Jan 22: The IMF has asked the government to remove various statistical discrepancies and direct the provinces to improve reporting on their fiscal operations.

The Fund officials, according to an IMF report, believe that data on government finances have suffered from lack of information on economic and functional classification of government outlays and inadequate reporting by provinces on their fiscal operations.

Moreover, the quality of fiscal data has been adversely affected by a lack of coordination between the Ministry of Finance and the Accountant General of Pakistan Revenue in generating fiscal reports and lack of facility to compile data on commitments or accounts payable.

The fund officials appreciated that the separation of accounting and auditing functions have already been implemented and the authorities have started posting in the internet reconciled public accounts at the federal level.

“Notwithstanding the good provision of statistics on balance of payments, the discrepancy between the customs data and those reported by the State Bank of Pakistan would need to be addressed timely and more accurate reporting on capital flows, including both official assistance and private investment flows, would be desirable”, the report said.

External debt statistics have been compiled for government and government-guaranteed debt by the ministry of finance and on private debt by the central bank. The balance of payments difficulties that surfaced since May 1998 revealed significant weaknesses in Pakistan’s external debt reporting, as data were not available with required frequency and there was no comprehensive reconciliation of data collected by different departments.

In that context, the Fund appreciated that authorities initiated a complete inventory of all public sector liabilities. Most of the public sector data were, until recently, in a manual book keeping system. The government has also started developing, with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a computerised debt management system, covering official assistance and supplier credits to Pakistan’s public sector.

It was also said that remedial actions taken by the state bank as a result of the Fund’s recent safeguards assessment, have increased the integrity of the central bank’s monetary statistics. However, the treatment of Fund accounts in the data reported to Statistical Technical Assistance (STA) remains to be verified. Also, IMF believes there are still large discrepancies in some monetary statistics compiled by the State Bank for programme monitoring and those published in the International Financial Statistics (IFS), including on net foreign assets.