Govt prepares 15-point action plan for upcoming IMF review

• Court performance reporting planned in Year 1–2. 
• Top 10 high-risk federal agencies to be identified.
• AMLA 2010 review targets ambiguity on predicate offences.

ISLAMABAD: Ahead of the upcoming International Monetary Fund (IMF) review mission, Pakistan has drawn up a 15-point action plan in response to the Governance and Diagnostic Assessment Report (GCD), including a move to identify the top 10 high-risk federal agencies with corruption vulnerabilities and macro-critical exposures.

The plan also sets out steps to reduce the backlog of economic disputes, including developing and publishing a methodology to assess the performance of courts and judges in Year 1, and issuing the first performance report covering all administrative tribunals and special courts dealing with economic and commercial matters in Year 2.

A detailed action plan comprising 240 pages prepared by the Government of Pakistan for placing an action plan to combat corruption and enhancing institutional strengths to combat corruption and improve governance states that based on the diagnostic report findings and reform options presented, comprehensive performance assessment criteria and framework for evaluating court and judicial governance and performance including diversionary/Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms will be devised with analytic and predictive capacities to implement active case management.

The working group will conduct Legislative Review of Anti Money Laundering (AML) Authority 2010 to remove ambiguities. The AML/CFT Authority will establish a Joint Working Group, comprising relevant stakeholders, to undertake a legislative review of the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA), 2010. The purpose of this review is to eliminate any ambiguity on whether a predicate offence conviction is required in order to prosecute money laundering.

The Joint Working Group (JWG) will also review AMLA, 2010 to identify other amendments, e.g. in the areas of definitional clarity, clarification of processes and procedure, and investigative powers, etc, needed to strengthen ML investigations and prosecutions under AMLA, 2010. The amendments in AMLA 2010 will be placed before parliament and subsequently notified and disseminated for implementation by June 2027.

The NAB will draft a national risk assessment on corruption, and to achieve multiagency inputs, bring it to the National Anti-Corruption Task Force (chaired by AMLA and including NAB, FIA, AGP, ACEs, SECP, FBR, CGA, PBS, and others coopted by the task force as technical contributors).

The task force will be established under the umbrella of AML/CFT Authority, as the overarching coordinating body for all “competent authorities”, (as per Section 6 (1) of National AML/CFT Authority in Pakistan Act 2023), eg NAB, FIA and all anticorruption establishments ACEs and other relevant agencies, to finalise a centralised Corruption Risk Assessment Framework for assessing the corruption vulnerabilities in various organisations. 

Based on the Corruption Risk Assessment Framework, the National Anti-Corruption Task Force will identify the top 10 high-risk federal agencies with corruption vulnerabilities and macro-critical exposures.

The National Anti-Corruption Task Force will develop a risk reduction action plan with clear KPIs and defined roles for each ministry and agency to address corruption risks in the 10 highest-risk agencies. The plan will include systemic actions applicable to all agencies and agency-specific measures, and will align its risk assessment methodology with Pakistan’s National Risk Assessment (NRA) for ML/TF.

The Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) will devise and issue corruption-specific reporting guidelines, including red flags for enhancing the reporting quality of the corruption-related Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs). The government will bring the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (PVARA) under the reporting framework.

Originally published in The News