Date: 24, November, 2025
By Engineer Arshad H Abbasi
At a time when Pakistan is struggling to stabilize its economy, rebuild public trust, and meet the conditionalities of yet another IMF program, the governance of its revenue authority sits at the heart of the crisis. The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR)—responsible for generating the resources that keep the state functional—has once again come under global scrutiny. The IMF’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Report serves as the most cogent confirmation yet that Pakistan’s fiscal woes are not merely financial; they are structural, institutional, and deeply political.
The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), essential yet fragile, is now fatally compromised. This is not merely a systemic failure; it is the ultimate indictment of successive custodians. Notably, the former head of the FBR also served as federal secretary of power and CEO of two major LNG-fired power plants. Had energy security been treated as a core component of national security—as it is in the US, India, and other developed nations—his accountability might have been sought under a far sterner statute, like the Treason Act. Instead, his tenure and the institution’s performance is scrutinised through the lens of the International Monetary Fund’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Report (IMF) as Chairman FBR. The report’s verdict on the FBR is brutally honest: a charge sheet in the purest sense. For that stark candor, the IMF deserves recognition.
There is a particular kind of tragedy reserved for institutions that have been hollowed out from within. It is not the drama of a sudden collapse, but the slow, grinding decay of purpose, competence, and integrity. It is a death by a thousand cuts, where each compromise, each act of neglect, each surrendered principle adds another brick to a tomb of its own making. Nowhere in the recent International Monetary Fund’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Report is this tragedy more starkly illustrated than in its dissection of the FBR. The report does not merely critique; it performs a postmortem on an institution that, while still breathing, has long lost its soul.
For decades, the FBR has been described as the linchpin of the state. The engine that funds the republic’s ambitions, from its defenses to its schools. To read the IMF’s assessment is to understand that this linchpin has shattered. The IMF, in its characteristically dry, technical language, delivers a verdict that is nothing short of mournful: the FBR is an institution adrift. A vessel of the state captured by the very dysfunctions it was meant to overcome. The term “macro-critical” takes on a human face here—it is the face of a citizen who sees no return on their taxes. Of a business driven to ruin by arbitrary demands. Of an honest officer crushed by a system that rewards the very opposite.
The tragedy begins with the very design of the system. The IMF finds the FBR to be “complex, opaque, and prone to manipulation.” This is not an accidental state of affairs; it is a cultivated one. A tax system that changes with the wind, altered by executive fiat and Statutory Regulatory Orders (SROs), is not a system of law but a system of discretion. It transforms the sacred contract between citizen and state—the payment of taxes for the provision of services—into a chaotic guessing game. Even for the willing, honest compliance becomes a near impossibility. The rules are a shifting maze. The only reliable guides are those who profit from navigating its dark corners.
The report paints a devastating picture of this reality: “Officials and taxpayers meet in corridors, not in transparent systems.” Let us pause and mourn the profound symbolism of that sentence. The “corridor” is the antithesis of the “system.” It is a space of shadows. Of whispered negotiations. Where public duty is bartered for private gain. Each meeting in those corridors, the IMF notes with chilling simplicity, “has a price.” This is the bazaar-ification of state sovereignty. The power to tax, the very definition of statehood since ancient times, has been reduced to a transactional hustle in a dimly lit hallway. What greater indictment can there be?
If the external face of the FBR is one of chaotic extortion, its internal machinery is a monument to institutional nihilism. The IMF states that the FBR’s internal controls are “weak or non-functional.” There is no effective internal audit. There is no real mechanism to handle corruption complaints. This is not merely an oversight; it is a conscious abdication of governance. It means the institution has given up on policing itself. It has accepted rot as a default condition.
At the heart of this emptiness is its IT backbone, the Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL). One would hope that technology would be the great disinfectant, imposing logic and transparency onto a broken system. Instead, the IMF finds that PRAL “lacks oversight and risk management, leaving vast amounts of taxpayer data exposed.” The tool meant to modernize has become another vector for vulnerability. The data of millions of citizens and businesses—the financial lifeblood of the nation—sits in a fundamentally insecure system. A treasure chest with a lock made of paper.
Perhaps the most soul-crushing element of the report is its note on leadership. “Senior management changes so often that responsibility dissolves before it can mature.” This is a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. How can any reform take root? Responsibility, the cornerstone of any accountable institution, simply “dissolves.” It evaporates into the ether of our perpetual political chaos, leaving behind a void where no one is ever truly to blame, and thus, nothing ever truly changes.
The most tragic confession comes from within. The report notes that the chairman of the FBR himself admitted that corruption is “endemic.” For a moment, the veil was lifted. A moment of stark, painful truth. And what became of this confession? The IMF notes, “Such words, from within the state, should have been a turning point. They passed unnoticed.” This is the true depth of our tragedy. It is not that we do not know the disease; it is that we have become so accustomed to the symptoms that even a terminal diagnosis from the head physician elicits no more than a weary shrug. The alarm bells ring in a vacuum.
We must never forget that this institutional failure is not an abstract concept. It has a direct, measurable, and heartbreaking human cost. The FBR’s dysfunction is a primary reason why our schools lack teachers, our hospitals lack medicine, and our children lack futures. Every rupee lost to corruption, every dollar not collected due to incompetence, is a meal taken from a hungry child, a textbook never printed, a road never built.
The system, as the IMF confirms, “punishes integrity and rewards survival.” Think of the good, honest officers who joined the FBR with a sense of duty, only to be sidelined, coerced, or broken by a machine that thrives on their silence or complicity. They are the unsung tragedies within this larger tragedy—the reformers who burned out, the idealists who became cynics. They watch as the survivalists, the corridor walkers, and the manipulators of the opaque system are promoted and enriched. This perverse incentive structure is a cancer that ensures the institution’s sickness is self-perpetuating.
The IMF has not just issued a report—it has sounded a funeral dirge for one of Pakistan’s most vital institutions. The FBR, in its current state, is beyond reform, dismantled by its own custodians. The tragedy lies not only in its failure but in our powerlessness as a nation to halt its slow collapse.
Mourning the FBR is mourning a lost future—a Pakistan where taxes-built infrastructure, compliance was respected, and tax collectors served the public. The IMF reflects this failure with stark clarity. The real question now is whether Pakistan can summon the political will to rebuild the revenue authority from the ground up. If not, the collapse of the FBR will remain a warning of a far deeper, far more enduring national tragedy.
Writer can be reached at ahabasi@gmail.com