Income Tax 2017: CBDT to Go After Potential Taxpayers Hiding Their Income

Currently, the Income Tax department has about 6-7 crore registered taxpayers. As per reports about 91 lakh new taxpayers were brought in the tax net last fiscal.

New Delhi, July 14: In a bid to widen tax base and increase revenues for the government, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) now plans to send request letters to all the potential taxpayers who have been hiding their actual income. The CBDT, that frames policy measures for the tax department has asked the Income Tax Department to increasingly identify those who can pay tax but are not doing so, with a special focus on smaller cities.

For this, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) Chairman Sushil Chandra has written a letter to his regional I-T heads across the country asking them to maximise efforts for the widening of the tax base during the current financial year of 2017-18. “Huge opportunities for identification of potential taxpayers have been opened up by data mining and data analytics in the wake of demonetisation and Operation Clean money,” Chandra said. It has also been decided that the data from the intelligence, criminal investigation and from the operation clean money will also be used to track people who are hiding their income.

Currently, the Income Tax department has about 6-7 crore registered taxpayers. As per reports about 91 lakh new taxpayers were brought in the tax net last fiscal. “Awareness meetings and outreach programmes may also be used for supplementing these efforts so as to encourage voluntary compliance, especially in tier-2 and 3 cities,” the CBDT chairman wrote. The tier-2 and tier-3 cities are those which are slightly smaller in population density and working human resource as compared to metro cities.

The CBDT Chairman has asked the taxman to find out more such people who are eligible to pay income tax but are not doing so by tapping data provided by the data mining and non-filers identifying database of the department, gather local intelligence, obtain inputs from market associations, trade bodies and other.

Terming widening of tax base as one of the “most important” policy objectives of the CBDT, the Chairman said that a lot of steps have been taken to increase the tax base which has shown appreciable results. “It is quite encouraging to note that almost 91 lakh new taxpayers were added during the financial year 2016-17. However, considering the increase in economic activities, both in the organised as well as unorganised sectors, there is a large scope for further widening of the direct tax base in the country,” Chandra said.