S Kamat
Someone must have said that the I-T Dept. officials are not putting in the proper amount of work and are in fact slackening which may be far from what the reality was. That is why the government brought in the demonetisation apart from many other weighty reasons which brought the I-T Dept. a huge amount of workload.
Initially it was reported that the I-T Dept. has sent in 18 lakh notices to individuals and entities whose deposits post Nov 10, 2016 to Dec 31, 2016 do not match their I-T returns and are in excess of Rs 5 lakhs. That truth on the number of cases has also changed now with the I-T Dept. stating that they are pursuing 1 crore cases. This is the actual number of cases thrown up by the data analytics tools used by the I-T Dept. So the I-T Dept. has another 82 lakhs cases to go. With 18 lakh cases the I-T Dept. would have been snowed under and with the 1 crore cases it is like being hit with an avalanche or a tsunami. The truth regarding the value of deposits has also changed from Rs 2 lakhs initially to Rs 5 lakhs in the middle and now finally
Rs 2.5 lakhs.
The government keeps playing with the truth. When questioned, they would claim that the latest truth is the ‘better’ truth. Little do they realise that there is only one truth which is infallible and non-negotiable. The average Indian is gleeful that the I-T Dept. is swamped with cases. What the Indian psyche does which the I-T Dept. is fully aware of is that it gambles in the good old ‘jugaad’ way that their file or case will never be picked up by the I-T Dept. Until the unlikely event moment arrives of their file or case getting picked, they deal with it in an attitude of ‘dekha jayega’ or ‘we will cross that bridge when he come to it’ – hoping against hope that the bridge never comes on their horizon.
The other thing is that these 1 crore cases are supposed to involve Rs 10 lakh crores which is rather close to the value of the demonetised currency. Thus with some conviction one can say that maybe the I-T Dept. and the government is yet again barking up the wrong tree, like when all the demonetised currency came back to the banks by 31st Dec 2016, and they will find that most of these are legitimate deposits within the existing framework of I-T rules.
