THE powers of the tax machinery are growing more strident but the recovery of actual revenue is getting harder and harder. The new production monitoring system rolled out by the FBR in the last fiscal might provide some technology-led direction to how these coercive powers can be down-blended with enhanced surveillance to yield something more intrusive but less punitive. But it cannot be the mainstay when thinking about the next generation of revenue measures the state must mobilise in order to escape tha shrinking confines of its resource envelope.

Asking for increased coercive powers for themselves is a standard operating principle for civil servants. In the tax bureaucracy, one can trace this demand back to the mid-1990s, and earlier too perhaps, when the tax authorities first got the powers of arrest. These powers were widened piecemeal through the years and had another layer added on top. This layer was surveillance. To some extent, surveillance powers were always vested with tax officers, but in 2008, they received a significant boost when powers of warrantless access and seizure of material as well as bank accounts were added on. And additionally, real-time access to data feeds from various government departments, including but not limited to Nadra, FIA, utilities, telecommunications and banks.

To a large extent, the enhancement of these powers was normal. The economy was growing in size and scope, technology was advancing, and the need to reach wider and deeper into the mass of economic activity over which the state presided was increasing. The powers of tax officialdom will........

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