The Income Tax department has issued Rs 64,700 crore worth refunds in the current fiscal, and for full 2018-19 fiscal the amount released was over Rs 1.61 lakh crore, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday.
In a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, she said that more than 6.49 crore electronic returns were submitted for assessment year 2018-19 (financial year 2017-18), up 18.65 per cent from over 5.47 crore in assessment year 2017-18, as reported by PTI.
The government has accorded high priority to issue refunds for all taxpayers which included small taxpayers. Less than 0.5 per cent of income tax returns (ITRs) have been selected for scrutiny, the majority of ITRs will be processed expeditiously and refunds will be issued, Sitharaman said, adding that with increased use of technology the time taken to process ITRs will also reduce.
Sitharaman further said that 26.9 crore SMS and emails were sent to taxpayers in 2018-19, reminding them to file their ITRs on time.
In January 2019, the Government had thereby approved integrated e-filing and Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) 2.0 project of the I-T department to process returns in an orderly and timely manner, the minister said.
The project envisages pre-filing of ITRs by the I-T department so as to improve accuracy of information contained in the return and significantly reduce the time taken to process returns and issue refunds.
Earlier, the Income-Tax Department had filed four fresh chargesheets against lawyer Gautam Khaitan, an accused in the multi-crore VVIP chopper deal scam, because of tax evasion and possession of undisclosed bank accounts in Singapore, official sources said Tuesday.
The department filed at least nine chargesheets against him in 2018 and the previous year on similar charges of possessing undisclosed foreign assets and non-disclosure of all assets and income to tax authorities in India.
