Parliamentarians tax diary

According to a Business Recorder report, the Federal Board of Revenue will soon release the details of annual income and tax paid by all 0.85 million taxpayers in a Tax Directory.
The directory would reportedly cover all categories of taxpayers including leading businessmen, service providers, prominent sportsmen, artists, public/private sector employees and rest of the income tax return filers.
While that would hopefully be quite a treasure trove for economic observers, here are the summary findings of the Parliamentarians Tax Directory recently released by the FBR for the year ended June 2013.
A look at the graphs here shows that PML-Ns legislatures are the biggest tax filers with a tax return of Rs332,000 on average. Those from PTI are second in number with an average return of Rs235,000 followed by PPPs MNAs who filed an average return of about Rs162,000. (Note: The average is based on those MNAs who filed the returns and whose tax paid was not NIL, according to FBRs Directory)
Looking at the same data, province-wise, the lawmakers from Punjab have been the biggest taxpayers, followed by Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and then Balochistan. This trend somewhat follows the overall economic structure of the country, where Punjab has the healthiest economy and Balochistan, the least.
However, before jumping to conclusions, one might also like to consider the following: Punjab also happens to be the province that has the most number of tax filers who reported NIL tax paid. To be specific, 38 MNAs from Punjab reported NIL tax paid (of which 30 were from PML-N), followed by 17 MNAs from KPK who reported NIL tax (of which 9 are from PTI).
When it comes to the Upper House, it is the JUI-F senators and independents who have filed the highest returns on average. Region-wise, it is the senators from FATA who have filed higher tax returns. In the Lower House, however, these MNAs had the lowest tax returns.
At this point, one would like to give credit to the government for such a politically brave move. One member of a foreign developmental community recently pointed out that Pakistan is now among a handful of countries which publish the tax details of its politicians.
This is a noteworthy development-especially considering the increasing criticism from the US and UK politicians who argue that why should their countries spend the tax dollars of their citizens in rescuing Pakistan from crisis, when, in fact, Pakistans ruling elite does not pay taxes.
At the same time, this column would like to maintain that these numbers are not very fruitful in isolation or on standalone basis. Still, one hopes that FBR would continue with the practice of releasing the tax returns of the politicians year after year, so one can have a better public scrutiny of public officeholders.
In the meanwhile, those who are interested in finding more about the financial situation of their constituencys MNA are encouraged to corroborate the tax return data released by FBR with the politicians annual wealth statement records maintained by FAFEN.