Tax Reforms in Pakistan Historic & Critical View

The False Narrative of Tax Cheating For at least 3 decades, policy discussion and debate has been dominated by tax issues. The narrative has been fully accepted and shouted from pulpits that Pakistan is a country that neither collects enough taxes nor is there a tax paying culture here. The related narrative on corruption begin very high in Pakistan has served to paint the country as totally immoral as well as with a state that is bordering on failure. This is despite the fact that many of our comparator countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and others are not doing much better than us. Huzaima and Ikram have relentlessly written about the problems in taxation over the last 3 decades highlighting all the failures in law, policy and administration. In this collection of their writings is chronicled a compendium on these issues that should hopefully will be used by researchers and tax practitioners to delve deeper into the subject of our failures in revenue mobilization. It is probably fair to argue that the many failures in tax policy, law and administration has led to the narrative now well established and backed by donors and our policymakers of pointing fingers at the poor taxpayer.