The Government of India (GOI) has swung into action the faceless income tax assessment and scrutiny, and this would all together transform the relationship between a taxpayer and income tax department and would surely lower down the corruption and tax malfeasance and quicken up the processing.
Faceless tax assessment and scrutiny simply construe that now a taxpayer would not need to personally contact or communicate with the tax officer. And at the same an assessing officer would be utterly techno-dependent and he would not be aware of the taxpayers, whose records he assesses and audits.
The government has delegated the responsibility of faceless or anonymised income tax verification & scrutiny and the formation of related modalities to the top-level direct taxes panel. The faceless processing and issuance of refunds have already been carried out by them in Bangalore.
“Terms of reference of the direct tax task force have been expanded,” a senior government official said.
Under the Narendra Modi administration, various taxpayer convenient measures were rolled out in the previous term, and now the measure of faceless assessment is the top-notch priority for the government. The squad of experts who have been appointed for this task has allotted time till July 31 to submit the report.
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At the same time, they have been asked to curtail down the complexities and compliance concern related to GST and Customs from the shoulders of taxpayers.
Now, the task force will explore more measures to simplify the tax mechanism while casting about a method for system-based assessment of monetary dealings.
In November 2017 the Finance ministry framed a task force to revamp the income tax norms and regulations to the simplicity and ease while considering the tax mechanism of other countries, economic needs of India and other best practices prevailing in the world.
The tenure of the task force which was gathered by Akhilesh Ranjan, who is a member in the CBDT had extended by two months in May by Arun Jaitley, who is the former finance minister. The task force will now have Ritvik Pandey, joint secretary in the department of revenue and Chief Economic Advisor K Subramanian as members. Former CEA Arvind Subramanian was a fixed invitee of the crew.