Income Tax return: Parliamentary panel pushes for strict assessment of agricultural incomes
India Today
The committee has expressed concern over the follow-up action by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to assess and verify these claims.
A parliamentary panel has pushed the government for greater scrutiny and devising of specific codes for assessment of agricultural incomes to plug evasion of taxes. The panel has flagged that more than 21 lakh tax payers in their returns for the assessment year (AY) 2020-21 claimed agricultural income and of these, nearly 60,000 reported agricultural income exceeding Rs 10 lakh.
The committee has expressed concern over the follow-up action by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to assess and verify these claims. This was after the CBDT chairman, in his deposition, informed the Public Accounts Committee or PAC that of the 59,707 returns of more than Rs 10 lakh among total of 21,55,368 cases, only 3,379 cases were chosen for assessment and scrutiny.
The Income tax department told the committee that due to shortage of manpower to check 100 percent such cases in all Commissionerates, where agricultural income claimed is above Rs 10 lakh, the Finance Ministry has devised its own mechanism for picking up cases for scrutiny due to paucity of manpower to handle the same.
A system may be designed to examine the 3,379 cases with due promptitude and based on these assessments, new scenarios may be included in the Computer Aided Scrutiny Selection (CASS) for refining the process of selection of cases for scrutiny.
The Committee in its report titled "Assessment Relating to Agricultural Income has flagged that the 3,379 cases chosen by CBDT includes cases of taxpayers reporting agricultural income less than Rs 10 lakh while focus of scrutiny should be on assessees reporting higher agricultural income.
The Committee has recommended that the Ministry should consider devising a mechanism for categorisation of cases of agricultural income in three slabs i.e. above Rs 10 lakh, Rs 50 lakh and Rs l crore in CASS so as to better target high evasion risk cases.
In its report the committee said, "Such a measure will also facilitate scrutiny of different types of agriculturists with the limited resources available with the Ministry/CBDT and enable in preventing possible leakage of revenue."
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