LAHORE: The 9th National Finance Commission has agreed to make efforts to finalise the NFC Award by December 31 this year.
A meeting of the commission chaired by Finance Minister Asad Umar decided that the next meeting to be held before end of the next month, will focus on FATA and the taxation aspects of ease of doing business.
The chairman emphasised the importance of a well deliberated and consensus based National Finance Commission Award and said that all federating units shared a huge responsibility in that regard.
He reiterated that the provincial governments will be engaged in fiscal related discussion with IMF.
He also suggested that each federating unit should nominate a focal person for data sharing to facilitate the working sub-groups.
The Finance Minister also stressed for strengthening NFC Secretariat and said that necessary measures will be taken in that regard.
The representative of Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa proposed a framework for NFC deliberations aiming at equalizing fiscal resources across federating units, equal access to public services for all citizens of Pakistan and expenditure efficiency at all levels of the federation.
All members agreed on the framework and lauded the efforts of the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in this regard.
The six sub-groups, formulated during the first meeting in February, gave presentation on various aspects of resources distribution as per the terms of reference assigned to the groups.
The main focus of all sub-groups’ deliberations was transparency, harmonization and sharing of data.
