India Issues Update On Tax Evasion Crackdown
The Indian tax authority has announced that it has begun the second phase of its Operation Clean Money initiative, within which it will challenge those taxpayers that have potentially failed to declare all their income.
The agency said that 556,000 taxpayers’ affairs will be scrutinized as amounts deposited in bank accounts exceeded income stated on tax returns.
A further 100,000 taxpayers failed to disclose all information on bank accounts held during the first phase of the project, the tax agency said. During the first stage, the tax agency scrutinized about 1.8 million “large cash deposits.” It received information from 972,000 taxpayers on the source of these funds and whether they had been declared and subject to tax.
Operation Clean Money was initiated by the Income Tax Department (ITD) on the January 31, 2017. It looked into large cash deposits between November 9 and December 30, 2016, and detected 1.8 million taxpayers whose income did not tally with the amount being reported for tax purposes. Those taxpayers were then required to submit information about that income, to verify that it was not undeclared income and funds were not being laundered. Around 1.3 million taxpayers made declarations and enforcement action is being taken in the remaining cases.
