Tax regulator talks tough on black money

New Delhi: The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Monday cautioned lurking stash holders saying it has prepared a database of about ‘900,000 pieces’ of instances of high-value transactions and it will soon ‘confront’ them with this information as part of its exercise to ensure timely declarations under the ongoing one-time black money window.
Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) chairman Atulesh Jindal, while talking to reporters here, said all those people who have such untaxed assets and funds should come forward and make their declarations before it is too late to utilise the Income Declaration Scheme (IDS) that ends on September 30.
"A detailed exercise has been carried out and we have prepared a database of 900,000 pieces of information (on cases of high-value and potential unreported cases)....it (database) has been prioritised. This is one area to tackle the tax evasion besides other enforcement measures. We will issue them (taxpayers) letters and confront them that we have information.
"We will certainly like to give them opportunity to come clean. People should avail this window. We want to say that we have this database and we will make them aware about this. The option is with them (to use the IDS or not)," Jindal said.
He said over 100,000 cases under this database relate to transactions of over Rs10 million. The CBDT boss, to whom the Income Tax department reports, called the IDS a one-time opportunity given to black money holders to come clean.
"The finance minister has clarified in all the meetings that this (IDS) is not an immunity scheme and any comparison with past disclosure schemes should not be done. We have tried to give an opportunity to those taxpayers to come clean, who, because of some reasons could not report their correct income in the past...just an opportunity has been given, just a window has been given," he said.
He said the Income Tax Department is "very very serious" about combating tax evasion. "We have an extensive database of information collected from various sources which we are utilising and we will utilise more effectively during the days to come," he said.
As part of the IDS exercise, the CBDT recently clarified that black money declarants using the one-time compliance window cannot pay tax and penalty from undisclosed income to bring down their liability and such acts will not get any immunity.