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A BUDGET White Paper is meant to let the public check the government’s figures and it does that chiefly by printing the “actuals” – the numbers reconciled with the accountant general’s office, ready each year by August, beside the estimates. Side by side, they show how close last year’s budget came to what was collected and spent. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s White Paper for 2026-27 has quietly dropped that column.
The 2024-25 edition carried several years of actuals, the 2025-26 edition still gave three, the 2026-27 gives none, showing only budget and revised estimates; estimate against estimate. The usual excuse, that the figures were not ready, does not hold: these are not audited accounts but AG-reconciled numbers, and those for 2024-25 were in hand by August 2025, long before the White Paper appeared. Even if the actuals survive elsewhere in the volume, removing them from the main tables weakens it, since comparing budget with outturn is the surest test of a budget’s realism.
This matters most because of one big change. A year ago the province announced a surplus of Rs157 billion, the largest of any province; this year, a deficit of Rs48 billion, a swing of over Rs200 billion in 12 months.
