FBR's 'Digital Eye': why video surveillance alone won't fix tax compliance
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Pakistan's Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has mandated video surveillance for roughly 180 textile mills, with non-compliance meaning a mill is classified as non-operational. It follows similar rollouts in the sugar, cement, and fertilizer sectors.
The initiative — the “Digital Eye” system — uses video analytics to monitor cotton bale consumption and production in real time, targeting an estimated multi-million-bale gap in tax collection.
A contested rollout
- The deadline has already been delayed twice.
- The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) challenged the requirement in court, citing cost and equity concerns.
Cameras are the easy part
Mandating cameras is straightforward. Making them useful is not. A system like this only works if three things hold: the analytics are accurate, the integrity of the data pipeline is protected end to end, and there is trust in the system among the businesses being monitored.
When monitoring is fair, transparent, and genuinely useful to the people subject to it — not just a surveillance tax — resistance to compliance drops. That is the difference between a mandate fought in court and one adopted in practice.
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