ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s tax machinery has suffered a major setback in its effort to identify undeclared foreign wealth, after the Federal Board of Revenue’s drive to trace offshore assets appears to have lost momentum amid persistent non-cooperation from the United Arab Emirates, especially on property-related data. Reports indicate the core problem was simple but crippling: Pakistani authorities could not get access to the kind of ownership information they needed from the UAE to pursue many cases effectively.
This didn’t begin overnight. Back in 2019, the FBR set up a special directorate to handle offshore assets and foreign property cases, saying it had already processed 1,199 cases linked to jurisdictions including the UAE, the UK, and data exposed through the Panama and Paradise Papers. Of those, 556 were said to be related to the UAE alone. At the time, the message from the tax authority was that it was building a more focused system to chase concealed assets abroad.
But the system ran into a wall. According to reporting by Business Recorder, UAE authorities shared only limited financial information with Pakistan on two occasions, including some data on bank accounts, shares and trusts, while withholding the far more sensitive and useful details on real estate holdings. That gap matters a lot. In cases involving undeclared wealth, foreign property records are often the missing piece — the thing that turns suspicion into a tax case. Without them, investigations can stall, and many did.
The scale of that obstacle became even clearer in 2024, when Dawn’s “Dubai Unlocked” investigation showed how difficult it had been for Pakistani officials to obtain meaningful records from Dubai. The report said authorities had struggled for years to secure even basic residency-linked information about Pakistani nationals, including data tied to visa status. It also revealed that by spring 2022, more than 23,000 properties in Dubai were linked to Pakistani owners. That figure sharpened public attention, because it suggested the potential size of overseas holdings was large, while Pakistan’s ability to verify declarations remained frustratingly weak.
There were domestic hurdles too. In 2020, changes made through the Finance Act narrowed the FBR’s proposed access to information from the FIA and the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment. Earlier drafts had envisioned broader, real-time access to records such as work permits and employment visa data. The final framework, however, limited that access mainly to international travel information. That may sound technical, but it reduced the tax authority’s ability to build a full picture of an individual’s foreign footprint.
Legally, the obligation to disclose overseas wealth is already there. Under Section 116A of the Income Tax Ordinance, resident taxpayers meeting the prescribed thresholds for foreign income or foreign assets must file a foreign income and assets statement. So the law is not really the weak spot here. Enforcement is. More precisely, verification is. A declaration regime can only go so far when the state cannot independently confirm what sits abroad, especially in high-value property markets.
That is where the contradiction becomes hard to ignore. The FBR maintains that it participates in the Automatic Exchange of Information framework, which is meant to help tax authorities obtain offshore financial data across jurisdictions. Yet the available reporting suggests that, in the UAE’s case, financial account information and real-estate ownership data did not move together. Pakistan may have had access to some account-level disclosures, but not the property trail that many investigators considered crucial.
More recently, the issue appears to have remained alive inside the accountability system as well. In 2025, questions were raised before the Federal Tax Ombudsman over the FBR’s handling of matters related to UAE-linked assets and golden visa holders, underlining that concerns about weak enforcement did not disappear with the earlier headlines. It was still being seen as an unresolved administrative failure.
So if the unit created to trace undisclosed foreign assets has now been shut down, wound back, or rendered ineffective, it reflects more than an internal bureaucratic reshuffle. It points to a broader collapse of capacity in one of Pakistan’s most politically sensitive tax enforcement areas. The state has disclosure rules. It has partial international exchange mechanisms. It has public evidence that substantial Pakistani wealth exists abroad. What it still lacks, though, is dependable access to the records that make enforcement stick.
For now, that leaves the government with an awkward choice: either push harder through diplomatic channels for property and ownership data, or rely on leaks, third-party datasets and domestic records to piece together cases one by one. Either way, the bigger picture is hard to miss. Pakistan’s rhetoric on hidden foreign assets has often sounded tough. Its practical reach, at least in the UAE, has looked much more limited.
