KP de-registers 65pc NGOs, freezes their bank accounts.

Byline: Mohammad Ashfaq

PESHAWAR -- The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has de-registered 65 per cent of the non-governmental organisations functioning in the province before freezing their bank accounts over failure to provide their funding and project details to the government to meet the requirements of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global illicit financing watchdog.

Sources in the industries and social welfare departments told Dawn that a total of 5,931 NGOs operated in different sectors across the province and 3,851 of them were de-registered.

They said the de-registration came in light of the government's NGO mapping efforts to meet certain FATF requirements.

The two departments deal with the affairs of NGOs, including their registration.

The sources said the social welfare department had de-registered 3,030 of the 3,838 NGOs registered with it, while the industries department had de-registered 821 of the 1,097 NGOs registered with it.

Action taken over organisations' failure to produce funding, project details

They, however, said no NGO had been found involved in terror financing or anti-state activities.

The sources said in the whole exercise of mapping NGOs, which began in May 2019 after the emergence of the FATF issue, the federal and provincial governments had doubts about the activities of around 80 NGOs functioning in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but it was declared that they all were fair and were not involved in any kind of terror financing or other anti-state activities when they were probed by the counter terrorism department.

They said the government first distributed a nine-page form to NGOs working in the province to produce detailed information of their affairs.

The sources said when the administration of NGOs didn't submit form to the social welfare and industries departments, letters were issued to them time and again to report to their registration authorities, but to no avail.

They added that the government later placed advertisements in local newspapers about the form submission for the information of all such NGOs.

The sources said the two departments later began de-registering noncompliant NGOs and freezing their bank accounts.

The major information sought by the government from NGOs include registration certificates; constitution, rules and regulations; annual action plan and five years strategic plan; detailed annual budget; tax registration certificates; tax exemption certificates; tax returns of the last...