Rs 16,000 crore undisclosed income discovered

New Delhi: CBDT on Tuesday said that its searches post demonetisation has resulted in people admitting to undisclosed income worth Rs 16,398 crore and seized assets of Rs 900 crore (Rs 636 crore in cash).  

Finance minister Arun Jaitley said that the  number of persons under the tax net has increased by 91 lakh as unaccounted cash lost anonymity post note ban.

Launching a new website on ‘Operation Clean Money’, a programme to bring illegal wealth on books, he said the fallout of the November 8 decision to demonetise higher denomination currency has increased movement towards digitisation, number of assessees going up and tax revenue jumping as also fear of dealing in cash being instilled.

CBDT chairman Sushil Chandra said there was 22 per cent growth in e-filed returns post demonetisation. As many as 17.92 lakh people were identified for unexplained deposits post demonetisation, he said, adding the tax department has identified one lakh suspected tax avoidance cases.

“We identified around 17.92 lakh persons in whose case the cash transactions did not appear in line with the taxpayers’ profiles. And online verifications of these transactions are underway,” Mr Chandra said. Of the 17.92 lakh, so far 9.72 lakh individuals responded to SMSes and e-mails sent by the income tax department.

These taxpayers have provided response for 13.33 lakh accounts involving cash deposits of around '2.89 lakh crore. The online responses have been assessed and no further action will be taken in cases of satisfactory explanation.

I-T department has on-boarded two specialised data analytics agencies and a business process management agency to augment departmental capability in analysing large volumes of cash deposit data, track the compliance status of taxpayers and reporting entities.

In Phase II of Operation Clean Money, the high risk cases will be handled by selecting appropriate enforcement action (verification, search, survey, scrutiny). A targeted campaign will be initiated in cases with identified risk issues.

"With the continuous flow of information from various sources including statement of financial transactions (SFT), the IT is conducting analysis in conjunction with previously available/analysed data. Such incremental data analysis has already led to identification of new cases for e-verification. Furthermore, IT has also identified 3.71 lakh new accounts relating to 1.58 lakh taxpayers who made partial declaration of accounts/amounts in their earlier responses. In addition to the earlier 18 lakh cases, 5.68 lakh new cases have been identified for e-verification process," said CBDT.