A BUDGET White Paper is meant to let the public check the government’s figures and it does that chiefly by printing the “actuals” – the numbers reconciled with the accountant general’s office, ready each year by August, beside the estimates. Side by side, they show how close last year’s budget came to what was collected and spent. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s White Paper for 2026-27 has quietly dropped that column.

The 2024-25 edition carried several years of actuals, the 2025-26 edition still gave three, the 2026-27 gives none, showing only budget and revised estimates; estimate against estimate. The usual excuse, that the figures were not ready, does not hold: these are not audited accounts but AG-reconciled numbers, and those for 2024-25 were in hand by August 2025, long before the White Paper appeared. Even if the actuals survive elsewhere in the volume, removing them from the main tables weakens it, since comparing budget with outturn is the surest test of a budget’s realism.

This matters most because of one big change. A year ago the province announced a surplus of Rs157 billion, the largest of any province; this year, a deficit of Rs48 billion, a swing of over Rs200 billion in 12 months.

A provincial surplus is widely misunderstood. It exists mainly to satisfy the IMF: the combined federal-and-provincial deficit is capped as a share of GDP, and since the federal side alone would breach it, the provinces must make up the difference. The budget figure is only a projection, the real surplus is whatever cash remains in the province’s accounts (Account No. I and IV) when the books close on June 30, and in my experience it often falls well short. And, contrary to what many assume, it is never handed to the Centre; it stays in the province’s own accounts, working by sitting unspent.

Which is why the missing actuals matter; it is that real, end-June surplus the deleted columns recorded. The Chief Minister, Sohail Afridi, has made no secret of the deficit, as the press reported, the province is withholding the grant it would pass to the Centre until the jailed Imran Khan is allowed his meetings and treatment, and will meet the gap from its own savings – the leftover balances of past surpluses. So one may fairly ask whether the Rs157 billion was ever saved, and how far this year’s deficit will draw it down, and only the actuals can answer.

Let me be clear: I am not alleging concealment – an honest format change would look the same. My point is narrower. Just as the province swings from surplus to deficit and ties part of its dealings with the Centre to a political demand, the document the public would most want to examine is the hardest to read.

What I ask costs nothing and favours no one: put the actuals back, or publish the reconciled figures for the last three years somewhere equally accessible. The reversal may have a sound explanation – but a White Paper should set it out, not leave us guessing.

— The writer is a former federal secretary and a former secretary finance of KP

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2026