[Dawn] More than 60 per cent of Pakistain's cabinet and two thirds of its federal politicians paid no tax last year, according to a report released Wednesday on tax evasion among the country's politicians.The study entitled "Representation without Taxation" by investigative journalist Umar Cheema takes Pakistain's elected leaders to task for paying little or no tax despite an estimated average net wealth of $882,000.
"The problem starts at the top. Those who make revenue policies, run the government, and collect taxes have not been able to set good examples for others," said the report, likely to increase pressure on Pakistain to implement tax reform.
There was no immediate reaction from top politicians, although a front man for the main opposition Pakistain Mohammedan League-N party told AFP it was up to the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to take action against any evaders.
Pakistain has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world, estimated at 9.2 per cent. Only 260,000 out of 180 million citizens have paid tax consecutively for the last three years, according to the FBR.
According to the findings,
President Asif Ali Ten PercentZardari
... husband of the late Benazir Bhutto, who has been singularly lacking in curiosity about who done her in ...
did not file a tax return in 2011 and neither did 34 of the 55 cabinet members including Interior Minister Rehman Malik
Pak politician, Interior Minister under the Gilani government. Malik is a former Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) intelligence officer who rose to head the FIA during Benazir Bhutto's second tenure. Malik was tossed from his FIA job in 1998 after documenting the breath-taking corruption of the Sharif family. By unhappy coincidence Nawaz Sharif became PM at just that moment and Malik moved to London one step ahead of the button men. He had to give up the interior ministry job because he held dual Brit citizenship.
Information was not available for one cabinet minister.
Of the 20 cabinet ministers who did pay, most made only negligible contributions, including Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, with 142,536 rupees ($1,466) and Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar with 69,619 rupees ($716).
The cabinet member who paid the most was state minister for commerce, Abbas Khan Afridi, who paid 11.5 million rupees last year ($118,677). Religious Affairs Minister Syed Khurshid Ahmed Shah paid the least with 43,333 rupees ($446).
Among all the politicians in the upper and lower houses of the federal parliament, 67 per cent failed to file tax returns in 2011; 28 per cent did and five per cent were not possible to verify, according to the report.
It also found that 78 members of parliament are still not registered with a national taxation number.
Pakistain's refusal to implement sweeping tax reform was instrumental in the collapse of a $11.3 billion IMF bailout programme in November 2010.