THIS is with reference to the report ‘Operators agree to block SIMs, finally’ (May 11). It was nice that sanity prvaild in the end. Earlier, the whole process had been held back by the argument that the move to block the SIMs would ‘hurt the industry. Not that one is carrying government brief, or advocating the stance of the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR); it is just that the national media, while sensationalising the issue, gave a wide coverage with even more dramatic headers to attract attention to the absurd logic. How hardly, say, half-a-million of about 190 million subscribers throughout the country, whose SIMs were proposed to be blocked due to non-filing of their tax returns, would have hurt the industry?

These half-a-million users happen to be the ones who had filed their returns in preceding years, but failed to do it this year.

Undoubtedly, the community of traders and businessmen is in the habit of making a lot of hue and cry against any initiative that governments, including those headed by military rulers, have ever taken to augment national revenues. Whether it is tax related to plots of land, agriculture tax, parking fees or regulating business hours, the community has a problem.

One may ask the telecommunication companies, if they were so perturbed about the loss of business on blocking the SIMs of tax-evaders, whose cases they were so strongly advocating, would they have not as a national cause supported larger efforts to identify and bring back the defaulters into the tax net?

Khaled
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2024