Budget presser

OFFICIAL post-budget media briefings in Pakistan are carefully choreographed affairs, full of reassuring phrases like ‘moving in the right direction’, ‘resilience’, and ‘enabling business and investment environment’ delivered by the keepers of the public exchequer. After the briefings end, journalists walk away with little they did not already know. The post-budget presser by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb was no different. While talking with the characteristic confidence of a bank executive, he could not quite paper over the tension at the heart of the new budget: a document trying to be a relief budget, a growth budget and a consolidation budget all at once — and only partially succeeding at each. The presser’s main theme was that the stabilisation phase was over and that this budget marks the journey towards growth. That narrative has political logic; the government has attracted much flak over the last three years of IMF-mandated punishing austerity and now wants credit for turning the corner. The relief measures are real enough. Salaried class tax cuts, the abolition of the super tax for companies, subsidised export financing, etc — these are not cosmetic. They are a response to the business community’s grievances and to the formal economy’s most beleaguered segment — the documented taxpayer who has been carrying everyone else’s weight for years. But generosity has a cost, and this is where the press conference got noticeably vague. When the finance czar was asked about the revenue hole created by these concessions, the answers drifted towards enforcement optimism. The FBR will do more faceless audits. Mandatory e-invoicing will document supply chains. Digital monitoring will plug leakage. The Rs15.3tr tax collection target, a 17.6pc jump over revised estimates, rests overwhelmingly on the assumption that the same institution which missed its target this year — and in preceding years — will now outperform it dramatically, and largely through mechanisms not