New Delhi: The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Monday termed “fraudulent” reports giving up various figures about black money declared from different cities during the recently concluded Income Declaration Scheme 2016 (IDS).
CBDT clarified that no official list of region wise declarations has been issued.
“The Income Tax department is committed to maintaining strict confidentiality of declarations made under the Income Declaration Scheme 2016,” said CBDT.
It pointed out that even finance minister Arun Jaitley while announcing the results of the Income Declaration Scheme 2016 on Saturday stressed that no break-up of these declarations on the basis of trades/ cities/states will be released in order to ensure absolute secrecy with respect to the identity of the declarants.
“CBDT requests the general public not to pay any heed to such fraudulent messages circulating on social media,” it said.
Modi government’s black money disclosure scheme has resulted in declaration of Rs 65,250 crore of hidden wealth in the country making it the most successful scheme offered to citizens to come clean by paying taxes. Some 64,275 people came forward to disclose their black money under Income Declaration Scheme 2016 (IDS).
The government will get Rs 29,362 crore in taxes (0.2 per cent of GDP) over two years under IDS which closed on Friday midnight.
While there are many different studies, private wealth management firm Ambit Capital in a report in May 2016 estimated country’s black economy at Rs 30 lakh crore. This will mean black money declared under IDS 2016 is just 2.17 per cent of the total hidden wealth of the country.
Last year, under a similar scheme for foreign black money holders, 644 declarations of undisclosed foreign income and assets were received, and just Rs 2,428 crore was collected in taxes. Between 1951 and 1997, 10 amnesty schemes were announced to declare unaccounted money. In the previous black money amnesty scheme, Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) launched by then finance minister P. Chidambaram in 1997, 4.75 lakh declarations were filed.
