By any standards the interim government, whose outlines are now beginning to appear, has a heavy agenda and a light mandate. This is a bad combination.

Here is some of the business that needs to be tended to without delay.

Top on the list is a fiscal deficit opening up like the Red Sea on the command of Moses. The tax authorities have a mammoth target of almost Rs789 billion to chase in the final quarter of the fiscal year, and this after a massive downward revision of the annual target by Rs255bn.

The interim government will have little time to devote to the structural dysfunctions that lie at the heart of this situation. The real scale of the deficit will become clear only after we have a new finance minister who is willing to disclose all off-book expenditures that have been incurred by the government thus far, with some estimates saying this could send the total budget deficit as high as eight per cent of GDP.

Compare that to what was budgeted at the start of the fiscal year: 4.7pc. To get an idea of what a 3.3 percentage point slippage means in this situation, consider that Pakistan’s total tax-to-GDP ratio is less than 9pc. In any such calculation, each percentage point matters, but even more so when your base is so low to start with.

The Federal Board of Revenue, upon whose shoulders the task of bridging this yawning deficit has been left, is making aggressive efforts to extract a few more drops of revenue from an otherwise famously indifferent tax machinery.

They’ve shaken down the textile industry, by first demanding Rs300bn as total defaulted amount on assorted taxes, and then settling the issue with recoveries of around Rs4bn from various units.

Now they’re turning their attention to other sectors. This time, according to media reports citing unnamed “officials”, they’re claiming Rs45bn from almost 150 companies as outstanding tax liability.

Once again, of course, the real amount will end up being negotiated between the companies and the tax authorities, who will settle for a lot less than the initial amount demanded.

It’s an old pattern, where the tax authorities announce the discovery of a massive tax evasion effort on the part of a given sector, apply some strong coercive measures like freezing bank accounts of large companies or arrest their employees. Recall the case with the telecoms in the summer, when the tax authorities loudly announced a Rs47bn “scam” in the evasion of interconnection charges.

As part of that affair, the offices of a major telecom company were raided, its accounts frozen, and the entire sector summoned before the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to answer corruption charges. So where did that whole affair end? In a negotiated settlement the outlines of which were never made public.

How this game plays itself out every time is in part a function of how well organised the sector in the crosshairs is.

So the telecoms were caught on a weak wicket because they had no industry association to represent their collective interests, unlike the textile sector which put up a spirited fight against the tax authorities because they have strong representation, either through the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association or other association leaders who managed to bog the tax authorities down in long and painstaking discussions.

Banks and oil and gas sectors are not very well organised to articulate a collective interest and could be more vulnerable, whereas the retail sector is unlikely to find itself audited so ferociously because it is highly cohesive in clumps, dispersed and very reactive.

Another entity with a “recovery drive” of its own to launch is NAB, which had been tasked with recovering power-sector bills last month. The Ministry of Water and Power had asked NAB for help in recovering unpaid electricity bills, and each power distribution company (DISCO) had been asked in February to provide a list of all defaulters who owe more than Rs100,000.

The lists were provided to NAB in March, and the total recoverable bills added up to Rs166bn, according to press reports. The lists included individuals, companies and government departments, including military and Rangers’ establishments.

But funnily enough, the list from Islamabad’s DISCO also included the name of NAB, which had defaulted on an amount of Rs291,000. So now what? How embarrassing that the bill collectors’ own name should feature on the list of people from whom outstanding bills need to be coercively collected!

In on-record comments reproduced in the media, NAB made it clear that it disputed the amount it had been billed. “We used some rooms in a building of the Ministry of Finance in sector G-5 but Iesco [Islamabad Electric Supply Company] sent us the bill of the whole building. We are negotiating with Iesco on the issue. Otherwise there is no outstanding amount,” their spokesman told this newspaper, before going on to threaten all other parties on the defaulters’ list with public naming and prosecution.

But they’re likely to find that just like NAB, all other parties on the list also dispute the amount billed to them — that they also would like to negotiate with the relevant DISCO — and they also feel that “otherwise there is no outstanding amount”.

So where will this lead us? The aggressive pursuit of tax or other bill recoveries always creates embarrassing situations for the government and for those being pursued. Inevitably, if pushed too hard, the injured party has the right to move the matter into a court of law and end the whole affair.

It is with this knowledge that industry representatives are able to inevitably stare down the tax authorities or bill recovery authorities and settle the matter on an amount far below what had originally been demanded. In the months to come, there’ll be a lot of negotiating to do by a lot of parties to keep a desperate government at bay.

The writer is a Karachi-based journalist covering business and economic policy.

khurram.husain@gmail.com Twitter: @khurramhusain