The Public Accounts Committee of the Punjab Assembly has ordered provincial departments to produce a complete record of state land handed over to member clubs, public and private alike, within thirty days, along with a full account of housing schemes operating without approval. The direction turns a routine audit hearing into a test of how far the province will go in tracing public land, recovering money owed to the treasury, and holding departments to account for files that auditors say were incomplete or missing.
The order came from Public Accounts Committee-I, chaired by Chaudhry Iftikhar Hussain Chhachhar, during a sitting that examined the audit report for 2022-23 covering the Punjab Board of Revenue, the departments attached to it, and the Punjab Land Records Authority. Hearings of this kind are where the Assembly looks back at money already spent or revenue already due, and asks departments to explain objections raised by auditors.
In this case, the committee asked four senior offices to supply the paperwork: the Senior Member of the Board of Revenue, the secretary for local government, the director general of the Lahore Development Authority, and the secretary for housing. What it wants is not a summary. It wants the complete lease documents for clubs occupying government land, including the terms on which the land was given, the conditions attached to the lease, the rules governing construction on the site, and evidence of whether those conditions have been met. When that record is missing, neither the Assembly nor the public can tell whether public land is being used on the terms agreed, or whether dues are being paid.
The same thirty-day direction covers housing schemes. Departments must draw up two lists, one of schemes that have been properly approved and another of projects that are unauthorised, and they must set out what enforcement action has been taken against the illegal ones. That distinction matters enormously to ordinary buyers. A family that puts its savings into a plot in an approved scheme buys into a project that has passed through planning and regulatory checks. A family that buys in an unauthorised scheme may discover, only after paying, that roads, utilities and legal title are not what was promised, and that the authorities may later move against the development.
The hearing also ranged over the audit objections themselves. Auditors raised questions about stamp duty that had not been collected in full, withholding tax that had gone unrecovered, fines that had not been imposed or collected, properties valued below their true worth, and revenue lost through housing societies that had not complied with the rules. Each is a different route by which public money can leak away. Stamp duty and withholding tax are collected when property changes hands, so undervaluation or a missed collection at the point of transfer reduces the treasury’s take at exactly the moment a valuable asset moves.
Members also pressed departments on a recurring weakness in audit work: records that were not produced when auditors asked for them. An audit cannot verify what it cannot see, and the non-production of records therefore sits at the heart of many objections in this report. Departments were also questioned about their replies to earlier objections, and about the recovery and use of government land more generally. The pattern is familiar in provincial audit hearings: an objection is raised, a department promises action, and at the next hearing the committee must check whether that promise was kept or merely repeated.
The institutions at the centre of this hearing explain why the record matters so much. The Board of Revenue is the province’s land administration and revenue authority, and the Punjab Land Records Authority, created under its own 2017 law and working under the Board, was set up to replace the old manual, patwari-based record system with a centralised digital one, offering ownership verification and land transfer services through its Arazi Record Centres. But a digital system can only verify the records fed into it, which is why the committee’s demand for complete lease documents and scheme lists is a necessary complement to the technology.
What happens next will depend on what the departments actually submit within the thirty days.
If the lease files arrive complete, and the two housing lists are accompanied by credible enforcement details, the committee will have a basis for deciding which audit objections can be closed, which require recovery proceedings, and which need to be pursued further. If the files arrive incomplete, it will face the same question as before: whether to press harder, through further directions or recovery orders, or to accept another round of assurances. For clubs, the same test applies: government land is a finite public asset, and a lease can only be judged good stewardship once its terms, rent and compliance record are on the table. Punjab’s land, housing market and revenue system all depend on records that are complete, accessible and acted upon, and this hearing is a reminder that those records are not a formality.
