ISLAMABAD: The National Finance Commission (NFC) award will be decided upon by the next government in a consensus reached between federal and provincial finance secretaries on Wednesday.
Debates regarding tax resource allocations were shelved till after the next election and work will remain to be carried out on updating technical and sectorial studies, reported Dawn.
A meeting called by Federal Finance Secretary Arif Ahmed Khan was called to deliberate and know where things stood regarding NFC negotiations in respect to 9th award and if it could be concluded before the next budget.
According to an official, the provinces said resuming debates on resource-sharing was pointless due to time limitations and elections looming in the summer.
Working groups have been provided three weeks to revise the technical reports. Sindh is carrying out work on devolved versus integrated tax structure-evaluation of tax collection framework in Pakistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa expenditure analysis at provincial and federal level, Punjab on resource mobilization at federal and provincial level for boosting tax-to-GDP ratio and Islamabad on streamlining of subsidy and grants.
The official declining to be named shared the reports were brought forth before the NFC meeting held in November 2016, but the center wasn’t happy with them. The aforementioned reports will give the data for holding negotiations on the next award.
The talks broke off after conclusion of 2nd meeting of the commission, when the centre demanded provinces to reserve upfront 7 percent from federal divisible tax pool before being divided between the federation and provinces.
It was suggested to be 3 percent for security of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and war on terror, 4pc as development expenditure in Azad Kashmir, Fata and Gilgit-Baltistan.
Since then, no meeting of the commission has been called largely linked to corruption inquiry into the Panama Papers which claimed the scalps of ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former finance minister Ishaq Dar.
The official added the government believed it was in no position to restart political negotiations regarding conclusion of new award in such a short period of time.
