Khursheed asks PM to constitute new NFC Award

The opposition leader in his letter also urged the premier, who is embroiled in a political crisis over the Panama Papers, to reduce non-development expenses of his government.

What is NFC Award?

The NFC Award is a series of planned economic program enacted since 1951 constituted under the Article 160 of the Constitution. The program was emerged to take control of financial imbalances and equally manage the financial resources to four provinces to meet their expenditure liabilities.

The program awards the designs of financial formulas of economic distribution to provincial and federal government for five consecutive years. However, there needs to be a unanimous political consensus between the provinces, and therefore the program has fewer conclusive results, so as only seven awards have been enacted ever since.

The NFC also generalizes the five kinds of taxation, including the income taxes, sales tax, wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, and custom duties taxes. The program is constituted by the President of Pakistan who coordinates and supervises the studies and calculations conducted by financial specialists, economists, statisticians and mathematicians.

In 2010, the seventh NFC Award was enacted conclusively under President Asif Ali Zardari. This followed a series of concessions and public debates. This affected the distribution formula taking into consideration new determining factors including inverse population rate, poverty rate and societal backwardness, provincial GDP and revenue collection and urban density.