ISLAMABAD: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has announced a significant shift in its operational strategy, moving to amend its governing laws in a direct response to the “prolonged pendency” of trials that has hampered the bureau’s performance.
According to yearly report 2025 detailing the Bureau’s current challenges, the necessity for legal reform stems from the “multiple complex legal prerequisites” currently embedded in the law. These requirements have historically created a bottleneck in the judicial system, delaying the resolution of high-profile corruption cases for years. To counter this, NAB is now fast-tracking amendments designed to remove these legal impediments and expedite the disposal of cases in court.
Beyond legal hurdles, the Bureau identified a critical “lack of effective coordination” with other state agencies as a major cause of fragmented information sharing and delayed inquiries. To bridge this gap, NAB is establishing a “seamless institutional bridge” in collaboration with the National Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism (AML/ CFT) Authority and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). This new framework is intended to ensure unified action, real-time data exchange and more efficient prosecution of financial crimes across provincial and federal levels. The Bureau also admitted to facing “considerable difficulty” in handling the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency and digital assets.
Recognizing that these technologies are often used to mask illicit financial flows, NAB is reportedly on a “fast track” to equip its teams with specialised expertise and technical capacity to trace and prosecute crypto related crimes.
On the international front, NAB is pivoting toward non conviction based recovery of stolen assets. Because traditional recovery methods often stall in foreign jurisdictions, the Bureau is actively building bilateral and multilateral relations with international anticorruption institutions to recover national wealth more expeditiously, even in the absence of a formal criminal conviction.
