Dr Bilawal Kamran
Walk through the corridors of Pakistan’s public sector long enough, and a pattern begins to announce itself with the persistence of a recurring dream. One institution stands accused of procurement irregularities. Another is flagged for internal controls too weak to notice, let alone prevent, financial slippage. A third is found in plain violation of the statutes governing its own conduct. A fourth simply fails to recover public money that was, by every rule on paper, recoverable. The institutions change. The auditors change. The years change. The conclusions, remarkably, do not.
This is the detail that should trouble policymakers far more than any single figure buried in any single audit report. A number can be explained away, contextualised, disputed by technical committees for months. A pattern cannot. And Pakistan’s public accountability landscape has, for decades now, offered nothing if not pattern.
Consider the recent findings concerning the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan. Among the observations, one deserves to be read slowly rather than skimmed past: the organisation’s failure to prepare its financial statements in accordance with its own governing Act. This is not a technical footnote. It is, properly understood, a collapse at the foundation of financial governance itself. An institution cannot credibly speak of transparency while failing to produce the very documents through which transparency is measured and judged. You cannot audit what was never honestly written down. You cannot hold accountable what refuses to be recorded. The statement itself is the first act of accountability, and its absence tells you almost everything you need to know about what follows.
Then there are the weaknesses in internal controls, weaknesses so persistent across so many audit cycles that they have stopped reading as failures and started reading as features. When the same institution is cited year after year for the same category of control failure, one must ask an uncomfortable question: has prevention simply lost the argument to explanation? Has it become organisationally easier, and professionally safer, to explain an irregularity after it has occurred than to build the systems that would have stopped it from occurring at all? The evidence, spread across ministries, departments, authorities and public corporations alike, suggests the answer is yes.
This is where the conversation must move beyond TDAP, beyond any single organisation, and toward the deeper structural malady of Pakistani governance.
The country does not lack audits. This point cannot be overstated. Pakistan’s audit institutions do their job with a regularity that would satisfy any international observer. Deficiencies are identified. Financial losses are quantified, often down to the rupee. Corrective measures are recommended, sometimes in exhaustive procedural detail. Responsible officers are named. The machinery of detection functions.
What fails, consistently and almost predictably, is everything that is supposed to happen next. The audit report is published. It generates a news cycle, perhaps a parliamentary question, occasionally a committee hearing. Then it recedes, the way all reports recede, into the archive of things that were once discussed. Months pass. A new audit cycle begins. And there, in the fresh report, sit many of the same observations, attached often to the same institutions, sometimes describing the very same deficiencies in language barely altered from the year before. The audit has not failed. Implementation has.
An accountability system that identifies the same problems repeatedly, without resolving them consistently, eventually forfeits its own deterrent power. This is not a moral judgment; it is closer to a law of institutional behaviour. Officials within these organisations begin, quite rationally, to treat adverse audit observations as administrative paperwork rather than professional consequence. Why would they not? If the observation of 2022 survives untouched into the report of 2023, and again into 2024, what signal does that send to the officer whose name sits beside it? Meanwhile, on the other side of this equation, citizens draw their own conclusions. They stop believing that oversight produces reform. They start believing it merely produces documentation, an annual ritual of naming familiar failures without ever forcing their correction.
That cycle must end. Not through another audit, not through another report, but through a mechanism that closes the loop the current system leaves permanently open. Pakistan needs a transparent, institutionalised requirement: every public body that receives a major adverse audit observation must publish periodic implementation reports tracking what has actually been done about it. Parliament should be able to see, at a glance, which recommendations have been acted upon and which remain untouched. The Public Accounts Committee should not need to rediscover the same finding three years running; it should be able to trace, in real time, who was held responsible, what was recovered, and why any observation that remains unresolved continues to remain unresolved. The public, whose money is ultimately at stake in every one of these findings, deserves the same visibility.
Accountability, in other words, must stop treating the audit report as its conclusion. It is, and should always have been, its beginning.
The recommendations sitting inside the TDAP audit are not complicated. Financial statements should be prepared on time, as the law already requires. Revenue should be collected and handled strictly within the boundaries of that same law. Internal controls need strengthening, not as an aspiration but as an operational necessity. Procurement rules exist to be followed, not consulted after the fact. And outstanding observations should be resolved, once and for all, rather than carried forward, year after year, like unpaid debt quietly rolled over onto the next balance sheet.
None of this requires new imagination. Pakistan has never struggled to identify what needs fixing.
The struggle, the real and enduring one, is that this failure belongs to no single ministry, no single department, no single organisation like TDAP. It belongs to a governance culture that has become extraordinarily skilled at exposing its own weaknesses and, in the same breath, extraordinarily comfortable ignoring them. Until consequences become as routine, as predictable, and as institutionally unavoidable as the audit findings themselves, reports like this one will keep doing what they have always done: diagnosing, with impressive precision, a disease that everyone claims to recognise and almost no one seems determined to cure.
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