FBR officers are being watched for how well they perform.

More attention comes from actions by the tax office over two years.

BY Mahnoor | 25-07-2026

ISLAMABAD: Tax officials say about 40% of officers at the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) being considered for promotion have been placed on a performance watch list due to skill and honesty problems. Also, suspension cases have tripled in the last two years.

In a background briefing, officials said financial honesty is a key factor for promotions. According to FBR statistics, the share of officers on the performance watch list rose sharply from about 2% in 2023 to about 40% in 2025.

They linked the rise to actions taken by FBR Chairman Rashid Langrial after he took office two years ago. Officials said that because of these actions and more checks, the number of officers with low honesty scores in key tax jobs dropped from 74% in July 2023 to 11% by June 2026.

They said 89% of those jobs are now held by highly rated officers. In Customs, low-rated officers in key jobs fell from 71% in January 2023 to 9% in June 2026. FBR officials noted the decline continued and grew stronger since the current chairman took over in August 2024, they added.

Favoritism based on family connections is also being discouraged. Officials claim that no officer was appointed on the recommendation of any politician or bureaucrat. All appointments were made based on professional skills, honesty, and ability.

Since August 2024, the tax authority has carried out one of the longest internal accountability campaigns in its recent history, authorities said. FBR data show that disciplinary actions resulting in major punishments against employees almost doubled, from 38 cases in the 2023-24 fiscal year to 75 cases in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

They said that suspensions of Inland Revenue Service (IRS) and Customs officers in grades BS-16 to BS-21 followed a similar trend, increasing from 33 in FY24 to 105 in FY26, about three times the pre-reform baseline.

The FBR has been watched by different groups and the Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) has also made decisions recently, pointing to problems in administration, operations, and policy.

In a background briefing, tax authorities said that by April 2026, 32 officers had questionable reputations – 14 from the IRS and 18 from Customs. Most had BS-20 and higher grades, and they were sidelined and denied postings.

But questions were also raised about the process for sidelining officers whose financial honesty is doubted. The FBR has previously struggled to gather strong evidence against such officers that courts would accept.

But the tax officials said they are very careful to ensure no officer is unfairly punished. Every high-level job now requires passing a new vetting standard created in the last two years.

For the first time, a system-based performance management method is used. Peer reviews are now mandatory and have reached 100% completion for the last three evaluation periods. This gives a better way to judge the honesty and professional skill of FBR officers and decide their jobs, promotions, and rewards, the tax officials said. They added that these numbers show the strongest push for accountability that the FBR has had in years.

Tax helper

Meanwhile, the FTO found a problem in the FBR’s FASTER sales tax refund system and on Friday told the tax authority to fix it quickly. FTO Zafar Hijazi warned that the flaw hurts exporters and hurts the automatic refund system.

In an order on complaints by Karachi exporter Quality Towellers, Hijazi noted that the FASTER system cannot tell the difference between a Goods Declaration (GD) for commercial export and a GD for non-commercial sample export. This causes the system to wrongly say “GD Not Realised” and send the taxpayer’s entire carry-forward refund claim to manual processing, instead of holding back only the right amount as required by STGO No 09 of 2023 and the Sales Tax Act, 1990.

The ombudsman noted that exporters sending product samples via courier were hit hard because those shipments didn’t require export proceeds and didn’t get sales tax refunds. But these declarations automatically appear in the IRIS sales tax return and can’t really be removed, causing problems during refund processing.

During the proceedings, Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL) told the FTO that it only gets export GD data from Pakistan Customs through an automated system and has no legal or technical power to change or fix it. It stressed that any change to the GD must be made by Pakistan Customs, after which the corrected data would automatically go into the IRIS system. The FTO called this a “systemic and dangerous loophole” that threatens the export sector and ordered the FBR’s Inland Revenue and Customs departments to fix it together.

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