High spenders: 40.72 lakh under tax scanner

New Delhi: Over 40.72 lakh high value spenders are under the scanner of the Income Tax department which plans to check potential evasion instances before the closing of the financial year on 31 March. According to data, the department has information on 40,72,829 persons who had made cash deposits amounting to Rs 10 lakh or more in their saving bank accounts in the current fiscal. “With technical solutions at the department’s disposal, there is a lot of information that is readily available to the authorities.[caption id=“attachment_1392847” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Tax scan. Andrew Middleton/Reuters[/caption] “We just want to send the across the message that nothing in clandestine and the department would get to know every transaction especially high value ones,” a senior I-T department official said. Among other information that the department possesses is that 40,40,396 people who purchased mutual fund units of Rs 2 lakh or more, bonds or debentures of Rs 5 lakh or more, shares issued by companies of Rs 1 lakh or more and bonds issued by RBI of Rs 5 lakh and above. The tax department’s official data prepared recently also states that 15,55,220 persons purchased or sold immovable property worth Rs 30 lakh or more, 20,61,443 persons made payments of Rs 2 lakh or more in a year against their credit card bills, people who received interest income of Rs 50,000 and above from banks and people who purchased bullion or jewellery of Rs 5 lakh or more. The I-T department, sources said, has also send notices for non-filing of taxes to close to 12 lakh people and entities even as many more such notices are in the offing. With the enhancement of technology, a lot of electronic data is now available to tax sleuths including that from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) which has a specific task of looking for suspicious and high-value money transfer cases in the country’s banking and economic channels. The I-T department, by releasing such data, intends to bring all such transactions into the tax net before the closing of the 2013-14 fiscal on March 31 and garner as much revenue as possible. Failure to declare correct income and liability is now taken on a priority basis in the department and defaulters stand to be penalised upto 300 per cent on the evaded tax and prosecution in a court of law is also initiated, the official said. PTI