Income tax department refutes harassment allegations
Industry leaders Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Mohandas Pai have made allegations of harassment with the aid of earnings tax dept officials
A CBDT professional stated there is no merit in these claims
NEW DELHI: The Income Tax department has refuted allegations made by means of enterprise leaders Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Mohandas Pai of taxmen harassing businesses, a criticism that has become louder in the wake of the recent loss of life of Café Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha.
Pai, a former director at Infosys Ltd, has instructed The Quint on 1 August that tax officials who have to meet their annual tax collection targets put strain on corporations to pay up even if they do now not concur with the quantities demanded, which leads to litigation. Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson and managing director and founder of biopharmaceuticals association Biocon Ltd, told The Telegraph in an article published on Sunday that “a authorities official” known as her recently and informed her no longer to communicate about problems such as ‘income tax harassment’.
“There is no merit in these claims,” said an official of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), who spoke on the circumstance of anonymity. The authentic declined to go into important points about how precise instances are handled. Every year, the tax department makes a approach on how officers need to go about optimising tax collections such as recovery of tax arrears. Senior discipline officers of the department in charge of precise regions often informally communicate to huge assessees underneath their jurisdiction ahead of important deadlines for paying boost tax, urging them to pay.
Often, officers are restrained to adopt progressive approaches of convalescing dues when they are faced with businesses resorting to aggressive tax avoidance measures exploiting loopholes in the law. This places the department and organizations on a collision course.
One of the first steps the Narendra Modi government did in its 2d term in office was to forcibly retire 25 senior officials of direct and oblique administrations dealing with expenses of corruption and illegal gratification. The officials have instances pending towards them filed by way of various central groups like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI).
Pai questioned in his feedback to The Quint the strength given to tax officers to arrest. He also demanded an independent inquiry into the loss of life of Siddhartha, whose physique used to be recovered from the Nethravathi river in Mangaluru. A letter attributed to the Café Coffee Day founder had proven that he was below pressure from one of the personal fairness buyers and had also confronted harassment from a tax branch official. Mint had said on 30 July quoting an unnamed earnings tax reliable that there was no harassment and that the department had observed due technique underneath regulation in the case.
