You can’t evade tax, as Facebook and Instagram posts to be raided now!
People of our country have been evading tax since long. Even those who escaped the demonetization phase would be having a hard time now. As the raids of Income tax would now not be limited to offline, the online raid would make your nights sleepless now.
Still clueless of what I am talking about? A picture of yourself in your brand new car, or a vacay to Thailand may lead to Taxman knocking at your door next morning.
By next month, PM Modi’s government will begin amassing a warehouse of virtual information collected not just from traditional sources like banks but also from social media sites. This will be done to match the income declarations with the spending patterns of households. Officials will be thus able to spot those who pay negligible or no tax. This will be done without raiding offices and homes as they have been doing till now.
PM Modi’s ‘Project Insight’ has been built over a period of 7 years at a cost of about Rs 1,000 crore ($156 million). It will complement the world’s largest biometric identity database and India’s most ambitious tax overhaul as policy makers try to get more people to pay taxes.
The step was necessary after the rising budget deficit despite the fact that Indian economy is fastest growing economy in the world.
Amit Maheshwari, managing partner at accountancy firm Ashok Maheshwary and Associates said, “Data analytics is the way forward for tax administrations across the world. This will also put an end to harassment by tax officials as there will be no public interface. Perceived randomness in scrutiny will come to an end.”
This isn’t a whole new concept, as the countries like Belgium, Canada and Australia are already using big data to unearth tax evasion that may have gone undetected without technology.
Finance Ministry spokesman DS Malik avoided making any comment on ‘Project Insight’. The government said that last year it had contracted L&T Infotech Ltd. to help build the network and boost voluntary compliance. The company has agreed to the build-own-operate-transfer model, which means that while it will be running the project and earning revenues during the contract period, it will ultimately transfer the network to the government once the contract runs out.
However, the next concern was about the intrusion of privacy of public in general. To this, the government has repeatedly told the Supreme Court it doesn’t consider privacy to be an absolute right. The OECD studied 21 countries that use technology to detect tax fraud and said in a March 31 report that while such methods offer a win-win by making compliance cheaper as well as boosting revenue, they must be accompanied by legislative measures and taxpayer consultation.
0 comments:
Post a Comment