According to Auditor General of Pakistan audit report for audit year 2017-18, key audit findings included; (i) there was a discrepancy of Rs4,420 million in the figures of inventory values appearing in the reports generated by Store Accounting & Inventory Control System and Annual Financial Statement of PR as on June 30, 2017. This indicates that periodic inventory reports generated by the IT Directorate are of no use for decision makings; (ii) Railways Ministry incurred irregular expenditure of Rs19.314 million due to recruitment of 03 officers having irrelevant qualifications. Furthermore, their contracts were renewed over the years and service rules were violated. Finally, their services were get regularised by extending undue;(iii) Pakistan Railways suffered a loss of Rs3.642 million due to posting of officers not possessing prescribed qualified posting and necessary experience against the post of data processing managers;(iv) non-achievement of intended benefit due to ad hoc arrangement in IT department despite incurring an average expenditure of Rs126 million per annum; (v) Ministry of Railways incurred extra expenditure of Rs20.76 million per annum due to hiring of 8 IT officials on four times higher pay package as compared to ministry of IT; (vi) there was no practice of formulating project management plans containing important elements such as project scope, scheduled and risks at the initiation of the project; (vii) owing to poor input and processing controls, PR sustained a loss of revenue amounting to Rs2.78 million on account of less recovery of passenger fare; (viii) further an amount of Rs676.68 million refunded to the public remained unverified; (ix) a loss of Rs36.892 million to the public exchequer was incurred due to taking up of an unviable project of online tracking system which is no longer operational; (x) PR incurs wasteful expenditure of Rs7.926 million per annum due to use of pre-printed cards to print tickets for its customers instead of plain paper tickets.
Pakistan Railways installed its first computer IBM System 34 to implement Stores Accounting & Inventory control system. The Stores Accounting System did not capture the transactional data completely, therefore the Railways management decided in 2003 to replace the system with an updated system. In 2015 development of a new application for Stores Accounting was started but the software still has not been developed despite lapse of three years.
Over the last four decades, Pakistan Railways took several initiatives to automate its business processes. However, none of its business processes has been completely automated. For example, the Payroll Accounting System and the Pension System are yet to be extended to a number of divisions and payroll of a large number of employees is still being maintained manually. In order to strengthen the IT department, a team of 9 IT professionals was hired on management position scales in 2015. With the induction of these professionals, a project of online ticketing was undertaken by PR. The system was launched on 22.05.20 16. The earning from the e-ticketing system was Rs2,541.258 million for the year 2017-18 which represented 5 percent of total earning of PR.