Hyderabad: In an attempt to address alleged corruption in the income-tax department, the government on Friday promised to switch over to anonymous assessment of returns selected for scrutiny.
Presenting the interim Budget 2019-20, finance minister Piyush Goyal said, “Within the next two years, almost all verification and assessment of returns selected for scrutiny will be done electronically through anonymised back office, manned by tax experts and officials, without any personal interface between taxpayers and tax officers.”
Experts believe that the lack of interface between the tax officer and the taxpayer would considerable reduce the chances of alleged corruption.
The finance minister said that returns, assessments, refunds and queries are all undertaken online at the income-department.
Last year, Mr Goyal said 99.54 per cent of the income-tax returns were accepted as they were filed.
He also said that the government has approved a path breaking, technology intensive project to transform the income-tax department into a more assessee-friendly one.
After the deployment of the new technology, Mr Goyal said that “all returns will be processed in 24 hours and refunds issued simultaneously.”
Currently, the processing of income-tax returns takes at least a few months.
Mr Naveen Aggarwal, partner and chief operating officer, tax, KPMG in India, welcomed the proposals to simplify the tax administration.
“An unequivocal aspiration of simplifying tax administration, with steps like processing of income tax returns in 24 hours and simultaneous issuance of refunds, computerised anonymous assessments, will be no easy challenge,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Goyal said direct tax collection for current fiscal exceeded the budgeted target by '50,000 crore to '12 lakh crore, while the mop-up has been pegged at '13.80 lakh crore for the financial year 2019-20.
The government had originally budgeted to collect Rs 11.50 lakh crore in current financial year from direct taxes, which include corporate tax and personal income tax.
As per the 2019-20 Budget estimates, out of the Rs 13.80 lakh crore direct taxes, the government aims to raise Rs 7.60 lakh crore from corporate tax and '6.20 lakh crore from income-tax.
This is higher than Rs 6.71 lakh crore estimated to be collected from corporate tax and Rs 5.29 lakh crore from income-tax in the current fiscal ending March 2019.
