When law takes its course, it doesn’t see who is the suspect and tries to bring everything to its logical end. A law is always tough and the authorities need to exercise prudence at every stage of its implementation. But this aspect of law is hardly taken into consideration when it comes to Pakistan. You cannot implement and enforce a law blindly on the people as the use of law requires careful understanding of the subject matter. When a prudent use of law brings respite to the people, an imprudent use of law brings disaster. The authorities have to take all aspects into consideration, especially when they have to deal with the business community. Even if the officials are legally and morally correct, the tough implementation of law can have long term negative effects. The trend to take a businessman as a suspect should be discouraged and the government will have to amend the law to stop witch-hunt of the entrepreneurs on the suspicion of tax evasion. Not all the businessmen are angels and not all of them are evils. There are good and bad everywhere and the business community is not an exception.
The tax authorities in the provincial and the federal levels are assigned different targets to achieve.However, to discredit and dishoura businessman in the eyes of law and public will have negative repercussions at the long run. If one businessman is prosecuted, the whole community will feel the heat. The tax authorities are proceeding against businessmen in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in which the most of the suspects have lost everything they had earned. But the fault is not in the tax authorities, but in the lawmakers who fail to amend the law to stop arrest and prosecution of entrepreneurs to save investment in the country. According to newspaper reports, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is ready to take action against 20 industrial units which had failed to pay infrastructure development cess. The provincial government had levied one percent infrastructure development cess on imported items as a result of which the businessmen started clearing their goods from the Karachi port.
The policymakers failed to understand a basic point. Less is the tax rate more will be the revenue generation and more is the tax, less will be the revenue collection. Levying extra taxes means encouraging the business community to look for other options. Until now the imported goods worth Rs21 billion had been cleared from the Karachi port after the imposition of one percent infrastructure development cess in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. As a result, the Customs Department suffered Rs820 million loss and the provincial government also faced a loss of about Rs30 million within two mo
