This is the fifth and final article in a series on Pakistan's broken public financial reporting system. The first asked why parliament approves new budgets without audited actuals. The second examined a system in which many institutions handle government numbers but no one clearly owns them. The third argued that the finance minister and the cabinet must take responsibility for year-end financial statements. The fourth asked an even more basic question: what does the state own and what does it owe? Taken together, they point to a problem larger than any single institution.

Pakistan does not simply suffer from weaknesses in budgeting, accounting, audit or parliamentary scrutiny. It has never built a complete financial reporting system in which the executive accounts for the money it receives and spends, an independent auditor gives credibility to those accounts, Parliament scrutinises them, and the law ensures that all this happens on time. That is the system Pakistan must build to maintain public trust in the state.

Pakistan still relies principally on cash-based government accounts prepared under the New Accounting Model. Whatever its historical contribution, the model does not provide the quality of information now required about government revenue, expenditure, assets, liabilities and overall financial position. The starting point should therefore be formal adoption of a credible, internationally recognised framework: the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), with a realistic and legislated transition from improved cash reporting to accrual-based financial statements.

But better accountability need not wait for full accrual accounting. Parliament should be able to see, in one place, the original budget, supplementary appropriations, final authorised amount and audited actual outcome, with significant differences explained. This is broadly the discipline required by IPSAS 24.

Today, anyone trying to understand what government actually spent may have to move between budget books, revised estimates, appropriation accounts, fiscal operations and audit reports - documents produced for different purposes and rarely reconciled into one authoritative picture. At the same time, Pakistan needs to start building a government balance sheet. The first step is not to attach heroic valuations to every national resource.