Income tax body cancels leave as over 50,000-crore revenue still to come

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has cancelled leave of all officials on tax collection duty and ordered 24X7 functioning of its offices till March 31 in order to collect the remaining revenue of over Rs 50,000 crore before the end of the current financial year (2013-14).

The direct taxes target for FY14 is Rs 6.36 lakh crore.

According to official data, as of March 20, the Income Tax Department needed to further achieve net collection of Rs 50,204 crore before the ongoing fiscal year closes on March 31.

At a recent meeting with all the I-T Chief Commissioners and Directors General in the country, CBDT said in an order, "Assessing officers and Additional Commissioners, Commissioners and Chief Commissioners involved in assessment work and collection of taxes shall not leave their headquarters till March 31."

In case of an emergency, the CBDT directed, that the board member in-charge of respective I-T zones in the country will be the only authority empowered to sanction leave or any other sort of detachment of the concerned official.

The video conference was chaired by CBDT Chairman R K Tewari, who has taken over the top job recently.

"It is positively believed that the targeted direct taxes kitty would be achieved by March 31 as the growth trends till now have been encouraging and they are very positive," a senior official privy to the development told PTI.

"Everyone has been asked to tighten the belts. The department is also hopeful about the advance taxes payment."

CBDT, the apex body of the Income Tax Department, has also issued orders that all I-T offices will be kept open on March 29 (Saturday), March 30 (Sunday) and 31st (Monday).

All head offices of the department were open on Saturday, March 22 to take a final decision on all cases of penalty and compounding of offences which will bring in additional and long-awaited revenue.

"Close to 5,000 crore could be achieved from under this head," the official said.

Taxmen have also launched a number of searches and survey operations across the country to clamp down on cases of tax evasion which has resulted in a number of entities declaring their hidden incomes and remitting the money in government coffers.

The department is also pinning its hopes on potential non-filers as it had recently issued letters to 21.75 lakh such assessees across the country.

Through this non-filers detecting exercise, the I-T department collected over Rs 1,900 crore in taxes with more than 5 lakh returns having been filed under the category.

An estimated 1,50,000 self-assessment tax defaulters were also detected during fiscal year 2013-14.

The department had initiated a business intelligence project, called Non-Filer Management System, in February, 2013, to identify PAN holders who have not filed their returns and about whom specific information was available in the department's electronic databanks.

Taxmen has already made it known that over 4 million high-spenders are under its scanner with plans afoot to check all potential evasion instances before the end of March.

According to data published by it, the department has information on 4,072,829 individuals who made cash deposits amounting to Rs 10 lakh or more in their saving bank accounts in the current fiscal year amongst a host of other high-value spenders.