NEW DELHI:
Government is set to
unveil an ambitious PAN activity monitoring and analysis software tool that
will enable Income Tax department to check transactions
history of a person country-wide and help sleuths in effective tracking of
black money trail.
The digital and smart platform is
called the Income Tax Business Application-Permanent Account Number (ITBA-PAN)
and is currently being put to final tests by a special team of tax sleuths and
business software analysts at a facility in the national capital.
The new software tool will enable
the taxman to view, in a chronological order, the entire "PAN life cycle
summary" or to simply say transactions history of an individual or entity
where a PAN number has been quoted, in any part of the country.
The project is expected to be
activated by the end of this month by the Finance Ministry and will also enable the tax
department and its two intermediary organisations--NSDL and UTIITSL-- to
allocate a fresh PAN number and subsequently issue a new card in 48 hours flat
as compared to the about 15 days time taken currently.
The operationalisation of the
project assumes significance as Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had recently said that the
government is at an "advanced stage in considering the requirement of
furnishing PAN card details if cash transactions beyond a certain limit are
undertaken."
The department, in order to enhance
its capabilities to better track large value transactions in the country, has
brought the ITBA-PAN portal and has for the same has also closed down its
"legacy" and the existing Assessee Information System (AIS) early
this month which till now used to hold the PAN database.
The new platform, according to an
official proposal accessed by PTI, will also allow the taxman to view and
capture various events of an assessee like "death, liquidation,
dissolution, de-merger, merger, acquisition, fake PAN or amalgamation of
PAN" in a specific or general case in an event of any investigation to be
carried out in a case of black money or tax evasion.
"The ambitious project will be
rolled out soon and the I-T department has already migrated all the PAN data
last week from the old system to the new one. With this project going
operational, PAN will become a unique identifying database in the real sense
all across the country," a senior official said today.
The new tool will also allow the
taxman to remotely identify duplicate or fake PANs in its system which has been
troubling the tax investigators for a long time and was used by criminals to
perpetrate black money operations within and outside the country.
The ITBA-PAN software will also
allow a PAN holder to request for deletion or de-activation of his or her PAN
and it will send an electronic and digitally signed "intimation
letter" in this regard to the concerned assessee.
The soon-to-be launched platform
will also allow an entity to activate a wrongly deleted or de-activated PAN
number.
In order to provide better services
to taxpayers, the platform will allow for a smooth computer-based transfer of
an individual's PAN number in case they are transferred or re-located from one
place to the other.
PAN is a ten-digit alphanumeric
number issued in form of Aa laminated card by the Income Tax department.
It is also a national identification
number of the taxpayer which has to be mandatorily quoted on the return of
income and in all correspondences with the department.
