Daily Times

The federal government on Tuesday replaced the chairman of the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR), Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry said, four months after it had appointed a new head of the tax regulatory authority.

Dr Muhammad Ashfaq Ahmed has been appointed as the new chairman of the FBR, the information minister said at a press conference in Islamabad.

The federal government, on April 9, had appointed member IT Asim Ahmed as the new chairman of the FBR. This is the seventh time the PTI-led government is appointing the FBR chairman.

Later in the day, the Establishment Division issued a notification for appointment of Dr Ahmad, a BPS-21 officer. “Dr Muhammad Ashfaq Ahmed, a BPS-21 officer of Inland Revenue Service, presently posted as Member (Inland Revenue-Operations) Federal Board of Revenue (HQ), Islamabad, is transferred and appointed Chairman, Federal Board of Revenue, under Section 10 of the Civil Servants Act, 1973, with the approval of the Federal Government, with immediate effect and until further orders,” the notification issued by the Establishment Division read.

The latest change at the top office comes days after cyber-attack paralysed the FBR on the Independence Day, and kept it out of commission for at least 72 hours.

Later it turned out that the cyber-attack was the result of complete, unforgivable incompetence, perhaps even corruption. Everybody at the FBR and even in the finance ministry knew very well that it was using obsolete software and was open to risk of hacking at any point. The country’s top spy agency also warned it in no uncertain terms, and the World Bank even gave it a $400 million loan, a good $80 million of which was specifically meant to upgrade the IT system. But while nobody in the FBR or the ministry was too worried about such things, they did however use some of that money to give bonuses to their staff, but not much more is known; and it is clear as daylight that none, or at least not enough, of it went to the IT department.

FBR stores all the data of all important transactions, and a whole lot more, that take place in the entire country all the time. The lion’s share of FBR’s data was reportedly compromised and the Bureau initially tried to hide its inexcusable behaviour by creating two different excuses for it.