Dr. Ayesha Ghuas Pasha, Minister of State for Finance, has stated unequivocally that the government is not considering any programme that would allow accountholders to deposit cash foreign money in their bank accounts without inquiring the source.
The minister briefed the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance that the Pakistani government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had decided that no more amnesty programmes would be implemented.
The International Monetary Fund opposes amnesty plans. As a result, she noted, the administration is not planning any strategy for accountholders.
Foreign Exchange
Malik Bostan, President of the Forex organisation of Pakistan, told the committee that the organisation has met with the Finance Ministry and the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to devise some realistic procedures to cope with the country’s dollar deficit.
He stated that the exchange companies provide the government with $300 million to $400 million per month and $4 billion per year through commercial banks.
He stated that if the government grants authority for the exchange corporations to solicit money from foreign Pakistanis through a direct swap policy, they can arrange up to $12 billion every year.
These schemes were announced respectively by former premier Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2018 and 2019 to legalise the offshore and domestic assets and the 2022 scheme, which was officially announced on Tuesday to facilitate the industrialists by whitening their black money.
The move, made through Income Tax Ordinance of 2022, will also bury these files forever or until the law is amended again. The government has also stopped the general public from seeking any information about these three tax amnesty schemes under the Right to Information Act of 2017.
NAB and the Federal Investigation Agency cannot ask the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to share information about the beneficiaries of offshore and domestic tax amnesty schemes of 2018 and 2019 and the 2022 industrial sector tax amnesty scheme, according to the cabinet documents.
The decision has been taken to stop NAB from asking the FBR to share classified information, which under the tax laws is protected and cannot be shared with anybody.
Upon refusal by the FBR to share this information, NAB had served call-up notices on nearly half a dozen top taxmen for not providing legally protected information that a taxpayer had shared with the FBR under the 2019 offshore assets tax amnesty scheme.
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