Coimbatore income tax department's focus
IT dept focussing on violations by banks and local bodiesCoimbatore: Income Tax department, Coimbatore, is focussing on nearly 50 banks that failed to deduct tax on payment of interest to depositors and local bodies that failed to remit the Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) in payments to contractors, Chief Commissioner of Income Tax O.P. Sachan said on Thursday.
Mr Sachan was talking to mediapersons on the annual performance of the department in Coimbatore, Erode and the Nilgiris along with Commissioners of Income Tax J.C. Mishra and Arun P. Pawar.Mr. Sachan said nearly 50 banks in the region had failed to deduct tax on payment of interest to the depositors. The bankers citing shortage of manpower had neither deducted nor guided the recipient of interests properly. Neither the banks nor the investors had forwarded the forms 15G/15H to the department on time in a number of cases.
These forms were meant for declaring that their total income was not above the taxable limit. In many cases the banks without even ascertaining the total income had guided the investors to file these forms. The department was already on the job of sensitising the banks initially and then initiating action against them. The recipient of interest from the bank was liable to pay a penalty of Rs 100 per day for the delay in filing these forms, they added.
Similarly, the focus is now on local bodies, especially the panchayats, that had failed to remit the tax i.e., the Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) in the payments made to the contractors for the last few years. The department was addressing the problem by talking to the assistant director of panchayats at the district collectorate in sensitising the local bodies to deducting the tax promptly and in remitting the same to the department account. This had been the case with nearly 500 panchayats, a number of town panchayats and municipalities in the region, Mr. Sachan said.
The hosiery town of Tirupur had the potential for higher tax income by virtue of huge business volume. The town had 45,933 assesses on record and the tax revenue had been growing year-by-year with more and more contract and sub-contract dealings. Since, there was a norm that a place should have a minimum of one lakh assessees to qualify for a commissionerate, there was no proposal to have a commissionerate at the moment. Tirupur was upgraded into an additional commissioner level only recently and probably it would qualify for the commissionerate in the next few years, Mr.Sachan said.
