advertisement
The Income Tax department has identified over 60,000 "high risk" people for probe under the second phase of the 'Operation Clean Money', which was launched on Friday to detect black money generation post demonetisation.
The CBDT said the category of people who will undergo "detailed investigations" as part of the next phase of the operation include businesses claiming cash sales as the source of cash deposits, like petrol pumps and other essential services like hospitals, which is found to be excessive compared to their past profile or industry norms during the notes ban period.
A senior officer said there is no threshold of deposits that has been identified under the latest operation and all suspicious and similar inter-related transactions have been chosen and brought under it.
The officer added that while the initial communication to these 60,000 people will go via the online medium, the taxman will also undertake search and survey action and also seek physical documents from the assessee as part of the operation.
The threshold under the first phase of the operation, that began on 31 January and ended on 15 February, was kept at deposits made to the tune of Rs 5 lakh and above.
"All the cases where no response is received shall also be subjected to detailed enquiries," it added.
The CBDT said the complete exercise of examining "all the doubtful and non-tax compliant accounts" may take more than an year to complete, but with the help of technology and continuous enforcement action, all the liable accounts will be brought to task.
The CBDT said the taxman also undertook "extensive enforcement action" of search, survey and seizure post demonetisation and has detected undisclosed income to the tune of Rs 9,334 crore between 9 November and 28 February.
The demonetisation of two high value currencies of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 8 November last year.
Under the first phase of the operation, it said, 17.92 lakh people, who entered into cash transactions that did not appear to be in line with their tax profile, were contacted via the online medium.
It added that the department has decided to close the verification in cases where explanation of source of cash was found to be justified.
"In cases where the cash deposit has been declared under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojna (PMGKY), the verifications would also be closed," it said.
It added that the impact of government action is already visible in the increase of 21.7 per cent in the returns of income received in Financial Year 2016-17.
Sixteen per cent growth in gross collection was seen, the highest in the last five years, 14 per cent growth in net collection – the highest in last three years and above 18 per cent, 25 per cent and 22 per cent growth in personal income tax, regular assessment tax and self-assessment tax respectively.
Join The Quint on WhatsApp. Type “JOIN” and send to 9910181818.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)