“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins”—John Locke A few years after my resignation from the Income Tax Service, I happened to visit the offices in Lahore as a representative of a corporate client. A female officer made a remark that left me somewhat bewildered. According to her, laws were binding on taxpayers, not on those administering them. Having spent nineteen years within the department, I had thought I had understood the relationship between law and administration reasonably well. Her statement appeared astonishing then. However, as I watch the annual ritual surrounding income tax returns unfold today, I sometimes wonder whether she was merely articulating an institutional philosophy that the rest of us had failed to recognise. For individuals and associations of persons (AOPs), the statutory date is on or before September 30 following the end of the tax year. In the case of companies, section 118 of the Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 prescribes December 31 where the tax year ends between January 1 and June 30, and September 30 in other cases. The words “on or before” are important. A normal tax year ends on June 30, which corresponds to the financial year (July to June) adopted by the state. Nothing in the statutory formulation suggests that a taxpayer who is ready to comply should have to wait until September merely because the administration has not yet made its prescribed return operational. It stipulates the last date by which the obligation must be discharged but there is one rather substantial difficulty. While the taxpayer may be ready, the FBR may not. Income tax returns in Pakistan are now overwhelmingly filed electronically through the online portal named IRIS (Inland Revenue Information System). Taxpayers cannot invent their own return form. They cannot prepare an Excel sheet containing what they consider adequate information and declare that they have complied with section 114. They must use the prescribed electronic return made available by the FBR. The state, therefore, controls the only doorway through which compliance is possible. Compliance cannot be a one-way street. Once the state makes itself the exclusive gatekeeper of compliance, its own preparedness ceases to be an internal administrative matter. It becomes part of the taxpayer’s ability to obey the law. This becomes particularly important because every Finance Bill, once passed an Act of Parliament, introduces amendments affecting rates, exemptions, deductions, credits, withholding provisions, declarations and sometimes the very manner in which income is to be reported. Naturally, the return form has to accommodate those changes. Nobody disputes that software requires modification in the light of these amendments. What is difficult to understand is why this annual phenomenon continues to be treated as an unforeseen emergency.