Excise Department Orders Mandatory Physical Checks for New Vehicle Registrations

Pakistan's Excise Department has issued a formal notice requiring full physical verification of vehicles as a mandatory condition for the issuance of new registration cards, a measure aimed at curbing document fraud and the registration of ghost or stolen vehicles in the national vehicle registry.

The directive stipulates that no new registration card will be processed without a 100 percent in-person physical inspection of the vehicle concerned. The notification addresses loopholes that had previously allowed registrations to be processed through agent networks or on the basis of documentation alone, without the vehicle being presented for verification.

Officials indicate that the measure is part of a broader effort to clean up the vehicle registration database, which has been subject to recurring complaints about fraudulent entries, double registrations, and records associated with non-existent vehicles. The problem has had downstream consequences for law enforcement, insurance, and vehicle taxation systems.

The policy change is expected to temporarily slow registration processing times as department infrastructure adjusts to handling mandatory physical inspections at scale, but officials maintain that the integrity gains justify the procedural adjustment.