The One Nation One tax concept will be adopted by the income tax department on large scale as soon as possible which will eradicate the jurisdiction issue over the assessment. It means that any IT officer from Patna can assess a taxpayer from Mumbai jurisdiction if in the case found liable or doubtful. This step will prove beneficial in eliminating corruption as the tax officials and the taxpayers will not need to meet in person and will also increase the process speed subsequently.
The initiative will bring the whole nation into one jurisdiction and will take the importance of all the wards and circles of geographical importance making only central jurisdiction powerful enough to take control, however, this will demand changes in the tax laws. A senior tax official mentioned that this initiative was first discussed in a high-level internal report of Central Board of Direct Taxes CBDT, and the initiative is under the talks and hopefully will be implemented in next financial year.
At first, the concept was captured within the e-filing process as there is no foundation of jurisdiction in the e-filing and all the e-filing will be processed at the Bangalore central processing centre. There is also a new concept referred to as e-scrutiny evolved after the thoughtfulness over the e-filing concept and the income tax department has chosen to use e-scrutiny on all the matters related to the scrutiny.
In which all the matters related to the transactions of taxpayers can be called upon e-mail and after the eradication of geographical boundaries from the assesses and tax department, there will be a faceless interaction between both of them. All the review and scrutiny of returns can be done via an electronic interface which will remove any obligation for the taxpayer to interact with assessing office in person. As a senior person mentioned that there will no need for any physical interface between assessing officer and the taxpayer.
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CBDT earlier formed a seven-member committee to make a standard assessment procedure for the e-scrutiny which will increase the transparency and liability. The board has recently taken some steps to decrease face to face contact between the tax officials and the assessees. In which it was ordered to the field officers that any questions raised by the income tax assessment must be relevant and also the board has directed that all those matters must be discarded in which the tax evasion was valued up to 5 lakh.
