Add the source-native Federal-receipt and transfer controls reported in the four annual provincial statements and the result is PKR 8.91tn. The Federal Annual Budget Statement separately records PKR 8.85tn as the provincial share in Federal taxes. The gap is PKR 63.7bn, or 0.7% of the Federal control.
A difference this small is tempting to erase. That would be a mistake. Federal and provincial books are produced by different institutions and can draw boundaries around grants, straight transfers, development support and timing in different ways. Similar labels do not guarantee identical accounting scopes.
Punjab reports PKR 4.42tn in Federal transfers, Sindh PKR 2.26tn in Federal transfers, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa PKR 1.39tn in Federal transfers and Balochistan PKR 834.4bn in Federal receipts. These are published province controls, not a reconstruction of statutory NFC percentages.
The distinction matters for comparison. A province’s reliance on Federal financing can be measured against the receipt control in its own statement. But reallocating the Federal total across provinces to force a match would replace official evidence with an analyst’s invention.
Good fiscal data often contains seams. Showing them is not a failure of presentation; it is part of the analysis. The right next step is a source-to-source bridge that identifies exactly which transfer categories and timing rules explain the difference. Until that bridge exists, both controls should remain visible and separately labelled.
