Aurangzeb says new tax AI-led model to issue notices; current account remains strong, remittances for this year expected

KARACHI, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 7th Jul, 2026) Federal Minister for Finance and Revenue, Senator Muhammad Aurangzeb on Tuesday said that the current account performance remained strong due to record remittance flows.

"We do expect our overall remittances for this year to close anywhere between US$ 41 to US$ 42 billion."

Addressing the second edition of Pakistan Banking Summit 2026 here, he said that the last fiscal year was closed on a strong note across all matrices, starting with the fiscal side, a Primary surplus, an all-time low fiscal deficit, debt-to-GDP ratio well below 70 percent, GDP growth closing at 3.7 percent on the back of strong rebound in LSM.

The Minister said they talked about the dip in exports and indeed from the good side there was a dip but that dip was concentrated on the food side and value added especially on the textile side has continued to register year-on-year.

He believed that the Foreign Exchange reserves would close at about US$ 18.4 billion for this fiscal year, which was higher than the estimates that had earlier.

Aurangzeb said they started with the Eurobond and the most significant trade has been the Panda bond because they had been at it at least for the last seven to eight years and not tapping the second largest, second deepest capital market in the world, has been a miss on our part.

Speaking about the pakistan stock exchange, he said that the activity drivers were more important than the psx numbers and the number of investors which had grown and more importantly, the Gen Z investors were coming in as well as then the corporate profitability which had returned to double digits.

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Referring to this year's budget, he said that the budget for the first time was led by the Tax Policy Office, which has been moved to the Finance Division.

He said, 'We focused on export-led growth, removing the advance tax, removing the super tax, low-cost subsidized financing, and continuing with the tariff regime.'

Aurangzeb thanked the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in this regard.

He said they were also going to come up with a medium-term tax strategy.

He said that the Parliament had introduced new tax administration operating model and it has approved the new structure because it was a new engagement model between the tax administration and the taxpayers, where the human intervention was going to be minimal. He further said that it was a very fundamental change because this was a model which was AI and technology led and notices would be issued by it.

Aurangzeb said the banking industry would remain absolutely critical in terms of our journey from stabilization to sustainable growth. Increased lending to SMEs, exporters, agriculture, manufacturing, construction and IT industries was going to be mission critical.

He said, 'I think we have moved in the right direction, but there's a long, long way to go.'

Speaking on privatization, he said that Pakistan International Airline which was now securely in the private sector hands and there were three discos, whose roadshow was also complete as well as 28 institutions have been handed over to the Privatization Commission.

He also lauded PBA and sought suggestions from the Summit.