ISLAMABAD: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has revealed that its subsidiary, Pakistan Revenue Automation Limited (PRAL), is supporting approximately 20 FBR applications without defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with FBR, leading to ambiguity in expectations and accountability, sources told Newzshewz.
Sharing different aspects of PRAL’s weaknesses and other issues including ineffective Board composition, due to which the entity is unable to perform at par expectation, the sources said that before the current ongoing restructuring of PRAL, there was absence of a designated chairman and there as an unbalanced board composition (4 members from FBR, 1 from the IT Ministry, and 6 from the private sector). Lack of business owners in previous composition and designated chairman resulted in suboptimal governance.
In the entire organization, only about 6% of employees are developers (50 out of 840), there is a significant mismatch between available skills and project requirements. For instance, having just 11 Java developers spread across 23 Java-based projects indicates a critical shortage of specialized talent.
The average salary for fresh graduates (40,000/month) is considerably lower than the market rate (120,000 /month), making it challenging to attract top-tier talent necessary for driving innovation.
The lack of a Center of Excellence (CoE) at PRAL hinders centralized expertise in key areas like software development, resulting in inconsistent processes, inadequate quality control, and insufficient employee training. The absence of a CoE also limits interdepartmental collaboration, leading to siloed operations that reduce overall project efficiency.
The sources said, PRAL has developed some major IT systems ranging from Tax filing portals to applications for automating revenue management. Currently, PRAL supports approximately 20 FBR applications without defined Service Level Agreements with FBR, leading to ambiguity in expectations and accountability.
Different departments interact directly with PRAL without standardized processes for requirement sharing, resulting in gaps between final products and business needs. This lack of coordination and prioritization has also led to delays in project outcomes.
FBR is of the view that limited formal quality control and testing processes also hamper quality of output. Testing is frequently scheduled at the end of development cycles.
According to sources, critical components have reached end-of-life status, which poses risks to operational reliability.
RAL’s current infrastructure, operating at near full capacity (80%), poses a significant risk to its ability to support future growth and end-to-end digitalization efforts. Without expanding its infrastructure, PRAL may face severe limitations in scaling services, which could stall key digital transformation initiatives and reduce overall operational efficiency.
The sources said, PRAL’s dependence on a monolithic infrastructure hampers scalability and service efficiency, making it challenging to adopt modern practices like micro-services architecture, which are essential for enhancing flexibility, modularity, and fault isolation. The current setup complicates both scalability and uptime, as the implementation of micro-services is still in its early stages. Additionally, PRAL operates on only two database instances, which restricts data segmentation and limits service independence. As a result, system performance suffers, and the organization remains vulnerable to downtime and bottlenecks. This outdated infrastructure restricts the ability to innovate, integrate advanced technologies, and respond quickly to evolving business needs.
