VAT in Pakistan

VAT in Pakistan

We already pay 33% taxes on every product in Pakistan. But Government not feel this dangerous condition of public. Now a new Frankenstein is about to suck whatever life is left in the veins of emaciated Pakistanis. On the other hand, the World Bank has linked its future funding and lending to Pakistan with VAT implementation.

After GST, now a new Frankenstein is about to suck whatever life is left in the veins of emaciated Pakistanis. Prime Minister and his cronies are saying that the Value Added Tax (VAT) is just a sweet GST, and wouldn’t have much effect. Yes, it wouldn’t have much effect on the Pir of Multan, his boss and their acolytes, who only know how to count in billions.

A newspaper report says that the THE IMF is so insistent on the imposition of a Value Added TAX (VAT) that it has relaxed the targets it had set for Pakistan to achieve in the next financial year, 2010-11, including the target for the budget deficit as a percentage of the GDP. It must not be assumed that the IMF has abandoned anything, just that it hopes to achieve the results it had intended from the original targets, from the imposition of the VAT. Those results include the economic subordination of Pakistan, so that it continues to be dependent on IMF handouts, and continues to toe the US line generally, but particularly in the War on Terror. This is particularly important after the USA has planned to withdraw from Afghanistan towards the end of the financial year. It has gone to the extent of interrupting the Doha talks on the Budget for a team to rush to Islamabad to seek a presidential assurance on the imposition of the VAT, though such a meeting has been denied by the presidential spokesman.

The report further states that the proposed VAT, which is being dismissed by government spokesmen as a mere renaming of the already existing sales tax, has been opposed by both economists as well as the business community. The government, however, has long made clear its commitment to levy it from the coming budget. Any doubts that this was anything but an IMF condition for continued balance of payment support should now disappear. This new tax aimed at the business community comes at the same time as the present government has silently abandoned its commitment to tax agriculture as well as speculative businesses like real estate and the stock exchanges.

It’s time that the masses rise against this draconian tax and show the public power.