PARLIAMENT AS COVER

HOW ISLAMABAD USED LEGISLATION TO ERASE A DECADE OF INSTITUTIONAL CRIME

The bill was introduced quietly, buried in Senate business on a weekday, its language dense with the procedural syntax that bureaucrats use when they want something to pass without being read. But the FBR Amendment Act 2026 is not a technical correction. It is a confession dressed as legislation, a document in which the Pakistani state formally acknowledges that it spent over a decade breaking its own laws and has now decided that the most efficient solution is to make the lawbreaking legal: retroactively, permanently, and without accountability for anyone involved.

The story begins with a Supreme Court judgment that should have settled the matter. In the Mustafa Impex case, the court made binding what should have been obvious: the term “federal government,” wherever it appears in Pakistani law, means the federal cabinet. Not the chairman of a revenue board. Not a secretary sitting in a Revenue Division office. The cabinet, collectively, as the constitution intends. The ruling was not obscure. It was definitive. And the Federal Board of Revenue ignored it for approximately nine years.

During those nine years, FBR members at Grade 21 and Grade 22 were appointed by the chairman and the Revenue Secretary, not the cabinet. Incentives and rewards were distributed to FBR employees without the approval of the policy board, which under existing law was the only body authorized to grant them. The board, headed by the finance minister and including ministers of commerce, industries, textile industries and privatisation, along with elected representatives from both Senate and National Assembly standing committees on finance and revenue, was bypassed as a matter of routine. Nobody in Parliament appears to have raised this. Nobody in the Finance Ministry demanded compliance. The appointments continued, the rewards flowed, and the institutional architecture that was meant to provide oversight over Pakistan’s revenue machinery was treated as an inconvenience.

This is not a story about administrative inefficiency. Administrative inefficiency does not persist for nine years across multiple governments, multiple FBR chairmen, and multiple finance ministers. What persisted instead was a system of patronage operating outside the law, insulated from cabinet oversight, insulated from parliamentary accountability, and insulated from any mechanism that might have forced transparency over who was being appointed, why, and on whose instructions. The FBR member is not a junior functionary. A Grade 22 appointment at Pakistan’s central tax collection authority carries enormous authority over enforcement, audits, and the management of billions in revenue. Whoever controls those appointments controls the institution. For nine years, that control sat outside any legal framework.

The government’s proposed solution to this documented illegality is not prosecution. It is not dismissal of illegally appointed officials. It is not even an audit of the incentives and rewards distributed without authorization since 2011, when the policy board’s authority was first bypassed. The solution is a Senate bill containing an indemnity clause of extraordinary scope. “All appointments of members made before the commencement of the FBR Amendment Act 2026 shall be deemed to have always been validly made.” The powers exercised by these members, the orders they passed, the agreements they signed, the rewards they granted, the functions they performed across fifteen years of institutional operation: all of it is now proposed to be deemed valid, always and retroactively, as if the Supreme Court never ruled and the law never existed.

This is not a legal instrument. It is a pardon issued to an institution by itself, written by the same officials who benefited from the arrangement and passed through a Parliament that was itself excluded from the decision-making structures now being protected.

The restructuring proposed alongside the indemnity makes the long-term intent clear. The FBR Policy Board, a body with genuine multiparty representation that existed to provide fiscal policy guidance and democratic oversight over the revenue apparatus, is to be abolished. The bill proposes to replace it with a tax policy office headed by a Grade 21 officer. No ministers. No elected representatives. No formal accountability to Parliament or cabinet. The authority that the Supreme Court said must rest with the federal government is being permanently transferred to a civil servant who cannot be voted out, cannot be questioned in Parliament, and answers to no constituency except the administrative hierarchy that appointed him.

The government’s statement of objects and reasons for the bill is itself a document worth examining. It acknowledges openly that FBR member appointments were, in practice, being made by the chairman FBR and the Revenue Secretary rather than the federal government. It does not explain why this was permitted to continue for so long. It does not name who was responsible. It does not describe what will be done about officials who exercised illegal authority across this period. It simply notes the problem, proposes to retroactively eliminate it, and moves on. The gap between what the statement acknowledges and what it demands accountability for is the story.

The cabinet’s interim measure, taken while the bill moves through the Senate Standing Committee on Finance, adds another dimension. Rather than restoring compliance with the Supreme Court ruling by requiring cabinet approval for future appointments, the cabinet has delegated its own collective authority to the Revenue Secretary: the same Grade 22 position that was at the center of the illegal appointment system. This is not reform. It replicates the same concentration of power in the same office, now with a cabinet resolution providing temporary cover instead of legal authority. The Mustafa Impex judgment explicitly held that the federal government’s authority cannot be delegated to individual officials. The cabinet has done precisely that.

The Senate Standing Committee on Finance is expected to take up the bill this week. The committee will operate under significant pressure to approve it quickly. Every sitting FBR member was appointed through the illegal system this bill is designed to protect. Every incentive and reward distributed since 2011 without policy board approval is now subject to legal challenge unless the indemnity passes. The institution’s operational continuity is being weaponized as a justification for legislative impunity.

That argument deserves to be examined on its merits. Pakistan’s tax collection machinery is already among the least effective in the region. The FBR’s failure to expand the tax base, pursue large-scale evasion, or collect from the politically connected is documented in every IMF review, every World Bank assessment, every annual tax gap analysis the institution itself produces. If the people appointed to run this machinery were selected through a system of patronage rather than a lawful process with cabinet oversight, the question of whether those appointments produced the outcomes Pakistan needed is not a procedural matter. It is the central question. And it is the question the FBR Amendment Act 2026 is specifically designed to prevent anyone from asking.

What Parliament is being asked to do is not to correct an administrative anomaly. It is to use its legislative authority to foreclose accountability for an institution that operated outside the law for a decade and a half, distributed patronage through channels designed to avoid scrutiny, and is now using its own accumulated illegality as leverage to demand protection. The bill does not clean up the FBR. It immunizes everyone who ran it illegally and removes the oversight structures that might prevent the same arrangements from continuing under new names.

The Senate Standing Committee on Finance should reject this bill. If it does not, the Supreme Court will eventually have to decide whether a Parliament can legislate away the binding force of its own judgments. That is a constitutional confrontation Pakistan does not need, created by an institution that had fifteen years to comply with the law and chose instead to wait until it had enough accumulated illegality to make compliance politically inconvenient.

The FBR Amendment Act 2026 should be read for what it is: not a reform, not a technical correction, not an administrative necessity. It is a document in which the Pakistani state, through the instrument of Parliament, attempts to place itself above a Supreme Court ruling it found inconvenient, protect the patronage networks of a revenue authority that failed to collect taxes while enriching its own officials, and permanently remove the last formal mechanisms of democratic oversight from the institution that handles the country’s fiscal affairs.