The Federal Tax Ombudsman (FTO) has unearthed a new scam within the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), revealing that several field formations manually registered taxpayers in violation of prescribed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
Taking serious notice of the maladministration, the FTO observed that such manual registrations pose a risk of state revenue leakage and warrant a thorough investigation. According to the FTO’s order, these registrations were carried out in breach of FBR’s mandatory requirement to link taxpayer registration with verified SIM numbers.
The order noted that the practice clearly falls under maladministration as defined in Section 2(3)(i) of the Federal Tax Ombudsman Ordinance, 2000, which covers any decision, process, or act of omission or commission that is contrary to law, rules, or established procedures.
In response, the FBR has been directed to instruct the Director General (DT & IT), FBR, along with Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL), Islamabad, to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the data of recently manually registered taxpayers by field formations to prevent any potential revenue leakage.
The FTO also recommended that departmental officers involved in bypassing FBR’s SOPs be identified and proceeded against.
As a sample case, the Database Administrator of the Regional Tax Office (RTO), Multan provided a list of 65 manually registered cases during November 2025. The investigation found that these registrations were carried out from the logins of departmental officers without following the latest SOPs for issuing new National Tax Numbers (NTNs).
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