Well done, Pranab tells I-T dept in Vodafone case

Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee praised the efforts and professional competence of the Income Tax Department in handling the Vodafone tax dispute efficiently in all the forums.

The department at present expects the Rs 2,500 crore in tax collection for the Vodafone case.

At a review meeting held here yesterday involving Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, Director-General of Income Tax (Inv), Commissioners of Income Tax at Mumbai, and CBDT Chairman S S N Moorthy, Mukherjee exhorted the tax officers to put their best foot forward to achieve the budget collection target fixed for the Mumbai region.

In 2008, the then finance minister P Chidambaram had said that Mumbai accounted for nearly a third of the country�s direct tax collections.

Advance tax in the Mumbai region has been growing at 18 per cent and with the TDS collection now catching up and the Rs 2,500 crore that the Department expects to collect in the Vodafone case, the budget collection target would be met from the Mumbai region, IT Chief Commissioner (Mumbai) PP Srivastava said.

In FY 06, the collection from the Mumbai region was Rs 53,164 crore while this fiscal, the target is Rs 1,50,480 crore. Now, the collection from the Mumbai region has been targeted to increase three-fold in a span of five years.

Mukherjee said the Mumbai region should not find it difficult to meet the collection target, given the high GDP growth trajectory into which the country's economy has catapulted itself.

The Minister called upon the Income Tax Department to draw plans for training its manpower and for capacity-building so as to be able to implement the Direct Tax Code in its true spirit.

IT Department needs to reinvent itself to meet the challenges to be faced while implementing the Direct Tax Code, he said.

The department should concentrate on its core functions of tax enforcement and recovery, tax-payer awareness and education, and on upcoming tools like data-mining, risk- profiling and risk assessment, he said.

Mukherjee also expressed satisfaction at the Department's efforts in filing almost all of its appeals on time in the Mumbai region in this fiscal, the release said.

He exhorted the officers to maintain their efforts in this direction and directed that all appeals should be filed on time in the future.