Beware! Govt Has Identified 1.36 Cr Indians Who Evade Income Tax; E-Filing Witness 3x Growth
Various reforms introduced by the Indian Govt. for increasing income tax filing is slowly, but gradually showing results as more and more Indians are now actually paying Income Tax. During 2012-13, only 1% of Indians paid any form of Income Tax, which has now increased to 4%.
As per recent data coming from the Indian Govt., it was revealed that during 2015-16, total of 5.24 crore Indians paid income tax, which is 4.2% of the total Indian population.
These numbers were shared by Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar while replying to a query posted in Rajya Sabha.
In May this year, when Govt. decided to make income tax report public for the first time in history, it was revealed that 5.1 crore Indians paid income tax during 2014-15, which has now increased by 24 lakh within a year.
Govt. Identifies Non-Filers Of Income Tax
In another reply, Minister Gangwar shared that under Non-Filers Monitoring System (NMS), Govt. has identified 1.36 crore Indians who have tax liabilities, but didn’t file any returns last year.
Under NMS, Govt. has teamed up with various third party vendors, state governments and in-house data collection agencies to investigate those who don’t pay any tax, intentionally.
Meanwhile, Income Tax department will send letters to around 2.59 lakh taxpayers, whose appeals are pending as on February 29, 2016, related to tax disputes.
E-Filing Of Tax Returns Increases Three-Fold
Till August 5th, total of 2.26 crore e-filing of income tax was reported by Finance Ministry, which is a massive three-fold increase compared to 2015. For the same period in 2015, only 70.97 lakh e-filings were reported.
If we compare e-filing of income tax with September, 2015, then there is an increase of 9.8%, as 2.06 crore people used the digital medium to file their taxes in that period.
Besides e-filing, e-verification of IT returns is also witnessing a healthy increase as total of 75.3 lakh taxpayers used this new facility till August, 2016, compared to 32.9 lakh in September, 2015.
Interestingly, Aadhaar based e-verification was used by 17.68 lakh taxpayers, compared to 10.41 lakh in September, 2015.
Some of the major tax filing related reforms introduced by present Govt. includes:
