FinMin to use third party data to detect excise duty evasion

"In a couple of months, we will have plans to gather third party information on excise duty evasion," a finance ministry official said.

The third party information relates to gathering information on the assesse concerned through other sources and then matching this information with excise duty payment to assess whether the party was evading duty or not.

For this purpose, electricity bills or VAT payment of companies concerned could be assessed to see whether there are any gross mismatches between their various payments and excise duty payment, the official said.

Already, third party information, called Annual Information Returns, exists to check detection of income tax evasion by high spenders.

There are seven categories through which such detection is made. They include information on high value cash deposits, credit card payments, buying of mutual fund units, bonds, shares and property, etc.

The necessity to go for third party information for detecting excise duty has arisen because excise duty payments had been seeing a decline.

In April this year, collections under this head fell by 3.9 per cent to Rs 6,410 crore against Rs 6,673 crore collected in April 2007.

This has prompted Finance Minister P Chidambaram to admit that meeting budget targets for this year appear to be a formidable task.