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THE FBR has a new chairman, the sixth one picked by Prime Minister Imran Khan in the three years of his rule. The top tax collecting agency’s poor performance is at the heart of the country’s chronic fiscal troubles. Former chairman Asim Ahmed’s slack response to the recent cyberattacks on taxpayers’ data is said to be the main reason for his removal. Along with him, the PM’s aide Waqar Masood has also been shown the door because he was unable to keep up with Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin’s tax reforms agenda.
This is not the first time Mr Khan has abruptly changed his economic management team. A few months back, he had unceremoniously fired his finance minister Hafeez Sheikh and brought in Hammad Azhar, who lasted only a few days. Then Mr Tarin was drafted in to manage the nation’s tenuous finances. Asad Umar, the premier’s first choice as finance minister, was dismissed in a similar manner to Mr Sheikh, bowing out before he could sign the agreement with IMF and present his first full budget. The bureaucratic reshuffles in the government’s economic management team have been even more frequent.
The shake-ups in the economic team signify two important crises facing the government from day one. At one level these frequent, overnight changes are a sign of the PTI leadership’s indecisiveness as to which direction the economy should take. If Mr Umar lost his job while struggling to balance the IMF’s economic stabilisation demands with his growth strategy as indicated in the two finance bills he had introduced in parliament, his successor was punished for doing what he was brought in to do — that is, implement the IMF’s harsh economic stabilisation policies. Now Mr Tarin has been tasked with rapidly growing the economy, overturning his predecessor’s policies, ahead of the 2023 elections. How long he will last is anyone’s guess.
At another level, the reshuffles point to poor governance by the top decision-makers at the political level. For example, the ongoing changes in the FBR indicate the government’s desperation to restructure the Board in order to mobilise the resources to finance the affairs of the state. But it does not know how to reform the corrupt and incompetent tax machinery. Shabbar Zaidi, inducted from the private sector to lead and oversee the ‘transformation’ of the country’s inefficient tax administration, had to quit in frustration over resistance from within the FBR because he did not receive enough political support for his tax reforms agenda.
With every FBR chairman brought in “with immediate effect and until further orders”, they cannot be expected to implement actions that would unleash strong opposition from within and without the organisation. And when people are inducted into the top slot because of their ‘services’ in hounding the government’s opponents, it is foolish to expect them to deliver on the reforms agenda.
Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2021
