New Delhi, Mar 3: The Income Tax department is using non-intrusive technology to tackle cases of “understatement” in tax returns filed by higher income groups and those in the super-rich category, the CBDT has said.
Talking about the surcharge levied on high income taxpayers in the Budget, Chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), Atulesh Jindal, said the number of such people, having salaries over Rs one crore per annum, is less than a crore.
“I agree that there is some understatement of income as far as these higher income groups are concerned. Some committees, set up to study this matter, have also suggested that understatement is made among the higher income groups.
However, this is in certain cases and all of them are filing their returns, no doubt.
“We are trying to make use of Information Technology (IT) to tackle such cases. The emphasis is on using more non-intrusive methods. We are making use of IT tools on a very large scale. We also have a very robust system to match the information that we have, from what we get,” Jindal said on Wednesday.
He said the surcharge was introduced to “compensate” for the abolition of the wealth tax.
When asked how many assessees were in this category of super-rich in the country, Jindal said the figure is “less than a crore.”
“The main emphasis of the Budget is to provide adequate funds for social schemes. A very substantial amount has been kept for infrastructure,” the top CBDT official said, calling it a very “balanced” Budget.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in his budget speech on February 29, had proposed to “raise the surcharge from 12 per cent to 15 per cent on persons, other than companies, firms and cooperative societies having income above Rs one crore”.
A surcharge of 10 per cent on taxable income of Rs one crore and above was imposed in 2013-14 by the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
