'Communication letters' by I-T Department inadvertent: Government
Finance Secretary RS Gujral said that there was no question of the government negotiating with any company on the tax amendments proposed in the Finance Bill for 2012-13.
The government said "communication letters" by the I-T Department to honest taxpayers were sent inadvertently and instructions have been issued to address the genuine grievances.
"...there was no intention of harassing honest taxpayers. The grievances, if arisen to some taxpayers due to incorrect uploading of data were inadvertent and all field formations stand directed to dispose of the applications for corrections on priority," Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said in the Rajya Sabha.
He was replying to a query on whether I-T Department has issued demand letters to several lakh honest income-tax payers from 2001-02 onwards.
Stressing that no demand letters were sent to "honest taxpayers", Mukherjee said the Bengaluru Central Processing Centre (CPC) has only issued "communication letters" to taxpayers intimating the outstanding tax dues in cases where the tax arrears were uploaded on the CPC portal.
"It was clearly stated that this communication was not a demand notice and it did not in any manner supercede the details of demand as per the records of the Assessing Officer and hence is subject to modification at any juncture," he said.
The letters were issued in the process of transition of the departmental records from manual maintenance to digitised mode, he said, adding that a central repository of all tax demands for better demand management has been created.
To achieve this, the minister said, all officers were asked to collate demand lying at multiple places, including manual registers and upload them on the CPC portal.