The tax office that resolves cases in 37 days for free

Pakistan’s tax problem is also a trust problem

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation around one of Pakistan’s most persistent economic failures. The country collects roughly six thousand billion rupees in tax annually but spends around nine thousand billion, meaning it borrows nearly half of what it needs to run the government every year. That gap, Muzamil argues, feeds directly into inflation. The solution is obvious — raise more tax — but the obstacle is equally obvious: ordinary Pakistanis do not trust the system they are being asked to enter.

“When we talk to anyone in Pakistan about paying tax,” Muzamil says, “they rightfully point out that the moment you enter the system, the harassment begins.” That is the premise for bringing Almas Ali Jovindah onto the show — a legal professional who sits on the other side of that harassment and is supposed to stop it.

From a village near Ziraabad to Punjab University Law College

Jovindah was born in Dhonkal, a historically significant village near Ziraabad. He completed his early schooling there before moving to Lahore, where he did his graduation at FC College and then his law degree at Punjab University Law College, graduating in 1991.

What made the experience formative was not the curriculum but the company. Punjab University Law College had a Section A reserved for the top twenty to twenty-five students, and Pakistan’s leading lawyers would come to teach them. Jovindah recalls being taught by figures like Asif Saeed Khosa and Ahsan Zafar. “Along with what we used to learn about law, the motivation, the inspiration, the leadership — I believe that played a very big role,” he says. Those classroom hours helped him and his peers figure out what they actually wanted from their careers.

His choice of law over medicine or engineering came from two places: a personal instinct toward justice — he says he has always been disturbed by the sight of people being oppressed — and family inspiration. On his maternal side, an uncle had been Governor of the State Bank and had helped design Saudi Arabia’s early economic system. Another elder was a renowned jurist. Seeing how deeply those figures were respected made the legal world feel worth entering.

The nineties detour: journalism, incorporation law, and Sharjah

After graduating, Jovindah quickly realised that lower-court litigation was not his temperament. Rather than abandon law, he moved to its backend and simultaneously took up journalism, writing foreign supplements for a newly launched newspaper. He describes this period — roughly three to five years — as one of productive confusion.

The clarity came through a niche he stumbled into in the mid-nineties: corporate incorporation. When the Sharjah government launched the Hamriyah Free Zone, Jovindah found his way to their project and ended up handling the incorporation and due diligence for Pakistani businesses wanting to register there. “We got a very big niche area,” he says, and it kept him busy until around 2011 or 2012.

During that same period, he pushed the Hamriyah management to introduce mediation and arbitration for commercial disputes — an idea they initially found hard to believe from someone so young. They eventually adopted it. He also claims to have introduced the pictorial-only Sunday magazine format at The News, arguing that photo journalism is “a very powerful way of communication.”

Teaching cyber law before the law existed

By 2012, Jovindah had turned his attention to something most Pakistani lawyers had not yet noticed. He began teaching cyber law at Quaid-e-Azam Law College in Lahore — before Pakistan had any cyber crime legislation at all. The principal, Nafeer-e-Malik, shared his vision and together they ran diploma courses and short programmes for students.

“I used to tell these students: this is the future, this is the futuristic thing. You must learn,” Jovindah recalls. When the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act was passed in 2016, he launched Cyber Legal Arm — Pakistan’s first exclusive cyber law firm. His team trained intensively in a single discipline, and when they appeared in court against senior attorneys, their specialisation gave them an edge. “They were able to deliver better than any of the top-notch attorney in Pakistan,” he says.

What Pakistan’s cyber crime law actually covers — and why nobody knows

Muzamil raises the popular perception that Pakistan’s cyber crime law is essentially a defamation tool used in political disputes. Jovindah pushes back firmly.

The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act contains 38 to 39 clauses covering distinct offences. The defamation-adjacent clause — “crime against the dignity of a natural person” — is one of them. The rest cover credit card fraud, data theft, blackmail using photographs or videos, unauthorised access to devices, and the alteration or transmission of data without consent. “We don’t read,” Jovindah says bluntly. “Our law already has a data protection provision. If someone accesses your mobile without your permission, alters your data, transmits it — it is a serious crime. Two years imprisonment.”

The law, he argues, was well-designed at the time of drafting. The problem is threefold. First, it has never been reviewed or updated, whereas European countries review their cyber laws every six months. Second, judges are not trained — a family court judge transferred to a cyber crime bench has no relevant knowledge. Third, the FIA investigators responsible for prosecution are too few and too poorly trained. Lahore alone has twenty thousand pending applications and six or seven investigators. “Cyber crime is on the rise,” Jovindah says, “and the reason is that we have only thought of cyber crime as the place where nude pictures are involved.”

He describes cases of girls on the verge of suicide because they have been blackmailed and have nowhere to turn. He contrasts this with the thirty-two CRIB countries — including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — where a reported cyber crime is traced and the perpetrator reached within forty-eight hours through coordinated international cooperation. Pakistan, he says, needs to outsource initial investigations if it lacks the capacity, collect the digital evidence, and bring it to court. “Digital footprints never evaporate,” he says. “It is the easiest way to collect evidence when it comes to digital crime.”

How the Federal Tax Ombudsman actually works

Muzamil asks Jovindah to walk through the process step by step, using the example of an IT professional who receives a large backdated tax bill from FBR that they believe is wrong.

Jovindah is careful to establish the sequence. The first forum is always FBR itself. If you receive a notice, you go there, present your case, and they are obligated to hear you. If they assess a tax and you disagree, there is an appellate forum within FBR’s own hierarchy — for income tax, for customs, for sales tax — and that forum must resolve the matter within a stipulated period without making you run in circles.

The FTO’s jurisdiction begins where FBR’s conduct becomes maladministration. Jovindah defines maladministration concretely: sending a notice and giving you no time to respond; making you sit outside an office for six hours; demanding a bribe; issuing a decision that contradicts the law; or withholding a refund beyond the sixty-day legal deadline. “The sixty-first day belongs to me,” he says. “That is his maladministration.”

Once a complaint reaches the FTO, the institution advocates on behalf of the complainant at zero cost. Staff help gather documents, call the relevant commissioner directly, and push for resolution. In one case, a company had been running around for eighteen months with no resolution. The FTO took the complaint, decided within three weeks that an extra 5.5 percent had been wrongly charged, and ordered FBR to issue cheques to ten thousand affected people. “We meet ten thousand people get relief out of just one verdict,” Jovindah says.

The FTO’s orders carry the authority of a Supreme Court judge. If FBR defies an order and the President of Pakistan upholds the FTO’s decision on appeal, the FTO can initiate contempt proceedings against any officer, regardless of grade. “You be a grade-22 FBR officer, you be a chairman or whatever — I can put you behind bars,” Jovindah says.

The steel mill scam and own-motion investigations

Beyond individual complaints, the FTO can initiate investigations on its own — what Jovindah calls “own motion,” equivalent to a suo motu action. He describes a scam they uncovered in the steel mill sector.

The government had allowed steel mills to have their sales tax added directly to their electricity bills, proportional to units consumed. To avoid this, a business could obtain an exclusion certificate from a commissioner by showing that it had already deposited the tax directly with FBR. What was happening instead: businesses were handing commissioners cheques — which were never deposited into the government treasury — and receiving exclusion certificates in return. The commissioner would pocket a fraction and destroy the cheque. The FTO identified this scheme across twenty-two steel mills and found that five to six billion rupees in fraud had already occurred. “We have caught a scam in which billions of rupees — just in twenty-two steel mills, and there are thousands of steel mills,” Jovindah says.

Anyone who brings a credible tip to the FTO — including, he notes, listeners of this podcast — can trigger an own-motion investigation.

Building an institution, not just running an office

Muzamil raises the question that haunts every reform story in Pakistan: what happens when the individuals driving the change leave? Jovindah joined the FTO on one condition — that he be given a free hand to revamp it as a model institution. He describes the FTO’s head, Dr. Asim Mehmood, as someone with genuine integrity and philanthropic commitment who decided from day one to revolutionise the office.

The results in roughly fourteen to fifteen months: complaints handled in thirty-seven days on average, down from sixty to eighty; seven new offices added to the existing seven, covering all major cities; online complaint submission introduced; new regulations drafted for the first time in twenty-two years; capacity building for staff; internships introduced for students; and 1,700 cases resolved informally in six to seven months.

The deterrence effect has been real. “FBR officers are now afraid,” Jovindah says. “Before, they were not. Now they know we will not spare them. We will hold them responsible.”

On institutionalisation, he is cautiously optimistic. “When I am owning my institution, today my feeling is that every single person in my institution is owning it. That was not the case before.” He believes that when the current leadership eventually moves on, the organisation will be strong enough to resist outside pressure — because the people inside it have internalised its purpose.

Twenty-seven years from now: IT over industry

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Jovindah how he sees Pakistan in twenty-seven years. Jovindah is honest about his frustration with current political and economic management but pivots quickly to what he sees as a genuine structural advantage.

Pakistan is the fifth or sixth largest English-speaking country in the world. Its youth population is enormous. And the digital economy does not require the capital that traditional industry does. “You invest one hundred crore in a factory and you give employment to two thousand people,” he says. “With that same one hundred crore, if I train one lakh children in IT — and then spend one additional month teaching them how to market their skills internationally — I tell you, we can revolutionise.”

He describes visiting Burewala — a small city known mainly as the birthplace of cricketer Waqar Younis — and discovering two thousand young people who are expert drop shippers, each earning between two and a half to four lakh rupees a month. “If that can be done in Burewala, it can be done anywhere and everywhere.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil wraps up by noting that government work rarely pays well, and that the people who do it honestly are doing it for something larger than a salary. “I know for a fact that government work doesn’t pay that much. And so it is something you either do for corruption or for a bigger purpose. I know that you’re not corrupt. Thank you for your service.”

The FTO’s website is at www.fto.gov.pk. Complaints can be filed online or at any of the fourteen regional offices across Pakistan.