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Have you been evading tax so far?

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Sonal Desai
New Update

MUMBAI, INDIA: There’s good news for honest taxpaying citizens in the country. The income tax department has plans to tighten the noose on tax evaders.

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Here’s how:

The IT department is planning to establish a smart database with details of all financial transactions to catch tax evaders. And helping the department nab the evaders will be an application.

According to Anita Kapur, Chairperson, Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), "It is called the Income Tax Business Application (ITBA), and once ready, it will improve data mining and business intelligence of the department and the taxman. It will be a robust database which will include financial transactions data of an entity including human intelligence collected on a person or entity."

"We just don't want to get penalty and unpaid tax from the evader. For us, tax evasion is not only a menace in that sense, it is also spoiling the entire compliance culture because the people who are tax compliant feel that the system is unfair," she said.

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She said the database will be set up later this year and be fully operational next year.

Sharing the reasons for the strict move, Kapur said the department wants to widen the tax net and is aiming at bringing in 25 lakh new assesses under the taxpaying bracket every month.

“Also there are chances that compliant taxpayers would waver from their duty saying why they should pay taxes when others can avoid it, and we wanted to nip that in the bud,” she said.

Kapur said the I-T department at present had only 1 percent of cases under the scrutiny category and was trying to introduce a regime where a taxpayer will have the least human interface, thereby reducing instances of corruption and emergence of a grievance.

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