New Delhi: As part of the second phase of the 'Operation Clean Money' (OCM) launched Friday to unearth black money, the Income Tax department will probe over 60,000 individuals including 1,300 high risk persons for alleged excessive cash sales post demonetisation on November 8 last year.
Over 6,000 transactions of high value property purchase and 6,600 cases of outward remittances shall be subjected to detailed investigations under OCM, an official statement said.
The second phase of OCM involves identification of high risk persons through use of advanced data analytics, including integration of data sources, relationship clustering and fund tracking. The high risk categories identified include businesses claiming cash sales as the source of cash deposits which is found to be excessive compared to their past profile or industry norms; large cash deposits made by government or Public Sector Undertaking employees; persons who have undertaken high value purchases; persons who have used shell entities for layering of funds; and where no responses were received, the statement said.
Among the stated objectives of demonetisation was ‘elimination of Black Money’. The opportunities created by demonetization is being used by the Income Tax Department (ITD) for widening and deepening of the tax base and create deterrence, not seen before, and to curb generation of black money. The complete exercise of examining all the doubtful and non-tax compliant accounts may take more than one year but with the help of technology and continuous enforcement action all the liable accounts will be brought to tax, the statement said.
Post demonetisation, over 2,362 search, seizure and survey actions have been conducted by the ITD during November 9, 2016 to February 28, 2017, leading to seizure of valuables worth more than Rs 818 crore, which includes cash of Rs. 622 crore, and detection of un-disclosed income of more than Rs. 9,334 crore. More than 400 cases have been referred by ITD to the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI.
The impact of this action has resulted in a 21.7 % increase in the returns of Income received in FY 2016-17, 16% growth in Gross Collection (the highest in the last five years), 14% Growth in Net Collection (the highest in last three years) and above 18%, 25% and 22% growth in Personal Income Tax, Regular Assessment Tax and Self-assessment Tax respectively, the statement said. The first phase of the OCM, launched on January 31, 2017, involved e-verification of cash deposits made in the banks, wherein 17.92 lakh persons, who entered into cash transactions that did not appear to be in line with their tax profile, were identified and requested for on-line responses on such transactions.
