Govt Wants PAN Card Details Of All Bank Account Holders By February 28th As Hunt For Black Money Intensifies

In one of the major crackdown on black money hoarders, Govt. of India has directed all banks to furnish PAN card details of all bank holders by February 28th, 2017.

Never before in the history of banking, such massive exercise has been undertaken to unearth black money. You can gauge the intensity of this move by the fact that Govt. had to amend a major Income Tax regulation to implement this order.

In cases where PAN Card is not available, the banks will have to provide details related to Form 60.

A statement from Finance Ministry said, “Income Tax Rules have been amended to provide that bank shall obtain and link PAN or Form No 60 (where PAN is not available) in all existing bank accounts, other than Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts (BSBDA), by 28 February, 2017, if not already done,”

Notable exemptions from this announcement are the basic savings bank deposit accounts, also called no-frills accounts due to low minimum balance requirement. It is interesting because Jan Dhan accounts are part of this category.

Hence, PAN Card details of Jan Dhan accounts holders won’t be extracted as of now.

Why This Is A Massive Banking Exercise?

As of February 2016, there were 24.37 crore PAN Card holders in India, which should be around 30 crore by now.

In comparison, as per RBI data dated March, 2016, there are 14.4 crore deposit accounts and 11.7 saving accounts in the country. Matching these two data would surely be a herculean task for the bank officials, as not all bank account holders have furnished their PAN details, and not all PAN Card holders have a bank account.

Jan Dhan Accounts Exempted

Now, by exempting Jan Dhan and other ‘no-frills’ bank account holders, Govt. has eliminated the scrutiny of 26.51 crore bank accounts, which are total number of Jan Dhan accounts in India today. (official data).

This becomes more interesting because total of Rs 70,070 crore has been deposited in these Jan Dhan accounts, even as 40% of them have zero balance. In order to investigate this mismatch of data, there should have been proper audit of these accounts as well.

In a related notification, Govt. has directed all banks to provide details reports and stats of cash deposits on all those bank accounts, which witnessed excessive amount of cash deposit between November 9th, 2016 to December 30th, 2016. And, for doing so, the details of these bank accounts would be checked from April 1st, 2016 to November 8th, 2016 to follow a pattern.

As per Govt. officials, these exercises will help them to track and monitor black money hoarders in the country.