ISLAMABAD: A high-powered official committee, in its report submitted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), conceded that there was a discrepancy in Pakistan’s trade data ranging over $18 billion over a five-year period from the fiscal year 2020-21 to 2024-25.
However, this discrepancy has been identified and reconciled.
Top official sources confirmed to The News on Saturday that the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) prepared a detailed report for the committee to examine and review the shift in trade data sources from PRAL to Pakistan Single Window (PSW) and submitted it to the Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Finance. This report has also been shared with the IMF.
On the directive of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) had initially constituted a committee in 2025 after finding discrepancies in bilateral trade data with China, particularly a massive mismatch found between Pakistan’s imports from China and China’s exports to Pakistan.
This committee found that the import data used by the Directorate of Research & Statistics (DR&S) of the FBR and the PBS, generated from WeBOC, had not been comprehensively updated since 2017. As a result, imports recorded under certain Goods Declarations introduced subsequently were not captured in the dataset used for official reporting. These excluded categories accounted for growing imports that resulted in under-coverage in reported import values.
The committee recommended integration of the PBS and DR&S systems with the PSW, annual review of the reporting process and the establishment of a bilateral trade exchange mechanism with major trading partners for accurate data coverage and to avoid discrepancies in the future. The PBS was directed to establish close liaison with Chinese authorities and the International Trade Centre (ITC) to ensure proper reflection of Chinese exports to Afghanistan transiting through Pakistan.
In the wake of these recommendations, the PBS held consultative workshops in June and July 2025 whereby concerns were raised that data derived from PSW reflected a higher trade deficit and, keeping in view the country’s engagement with the IMF, any transition in trade data needed to be calibrated carefully. The minister for finance had constituted a committee to examine and review the shift of the source of data from PRAL to PSW.
This committee scrutinised the trade data and found that in 2020-21, there was a difference in trade data to the tune of $1.4 billion between PRAL and PSW data. In 2021-22, there was a difference of $2.527 billion. In 2022-23, there was a difference of $2.402 billion, in 2023-24 the difference ballooned to $5.572 billion and in 2024-25 it further widened to $6.224 billion. In totality, there was a difference in trade data of over $18 billion in five years from 2020-21 to 2024-25.
The analysis of trade data from 2020-21 to 2024-25 shows that there were widening inconsistencies between trade statistics under 15 Goods Declarations under PSW data and 7 declarations under PRAL-based data used by the PBS. A Goods declarations-wise comparison clearly indicates the facilitation scheme category is the principal source of this widening gap between the two datasets. Other Goods declarations demonstrate minor differences, indicating that the major discrepancies were concentrated in newly introduced or expanded reporting categories rather than in legacy reporting datasets. Consequently, the divergence in reported import data over time increased from $1.4 billion in FY2020-21 to $6.2 billion in FY2024-25.
