THERE are times when the audacity and mismatch between what is being said and what is being done leaves us all dumbfounded. Recently, the National Database and Registration Authority completed an exercise aimed at identifying those individuals who have lifestyles of opulence and luxury yet pay no taxes. The results strain credulity, in a country where credulity is already in short supply. Tens of thousands of people live in posh areas of big cities, own luxury cars, engage in lucrative professions such as medicine and law and possess licenses for weapons — yet they pay no taxes. Over a million and a half people travel abroad multiple times in a year, and more than half a million people own multiple bank accounts without being registered as tax payers.

The numbers may not be very large in proportion to the overall population, but the audacity of living in this manner without paying taxes, and in many cases without even being registered with the tax authorities, is confounding even for Pakistan. We all knew these numbers would be large when they came in, but we weren’t prepared for how large and how audacious the picture of tax evasion in Pakistan really turned out to be. This would be just another data release were it not for the timing. Nadra’s disclosures come only days after the announcement of another ‘tax amnesty scheme’, the purported intent of which is to bring evaded wealth into the tax net. Past schemes of this sort have had as much success as de-weaponisation drives in conflict areas.

Pakistan has one of the highest cash-to-bank deposit ratios in the world, which basically means that Pakistanis prefer holding their wealth in cash, and prefer to execute their transactions in cash rather than use banking channels. The reason is obvious: cash transactions are difficult to trace. The volume of money that circulates in the cash economy in Pakistan is larger than it is in most other countries of the world. Bringing this money into the tax net, a fact whose importance and urgency has been highlighted by the numbers compiled by Nadra, will not happen with more ‘amnesty’ schemes. It will happen when there is a will to connect the dots and identify the evaders on the part of the Federal Board of Revenue, when there is a will to document commercial transactions through a value-added tax, and above all, when there is a will on the part of citizens to change their mindset and carry their part of the burden to pay for their state’s expenses.