A new kind of harassment: Government notice seeking information

These notices are not included in the ease of doing business calculations

A new kind of harassment has appeared in India. It’s the notice that seeks information. Sounds reasonable till you see what sort of information is being sought. These notices are not included into the ease of doing business calculations. 

Soon after the finance minister, in her budget speech, assured business people of friendly treatment, a company received a notice from the income tax department asking for a huge amount of information. About half of the information being sought is irrelevant to the purpose at hand. A lot of it goes back a decade or more. Some of it involves foreigners — and so on, you get the idea. 

Another friend, an exporter with a tiny turnover, received a notice, from the ministry of statistics in his case, again asking for vast quantities of information that had either already been provided to another ministry or did not exist because in his case, as in thousands of others, it could not possibly exist.

There must be hundreds of thousands of businesses that receive these notices, which are accompanied by the dire threats that are provided for in the law. Having no choice in the matter, they must all be devoting some manpower and time to gathering, collating and filing this information  — which in all probability no one will look at and which, again in all probability, will be re-sought next year by some other junior official. 

Some of the information being sought requires a large number of man-hours to be devoted and the cost is quite substantial. The problem gets compounded when some of this information does not exist because, as I said earlier, it cannot exist because it’s conditional upon something else happening that’s not in the particular business’s control. 

I asked a former secretary to the government about this problem. He told me that no one properly supervises the guys who send out these notices. Another said the incompetent cannot supervise the more incompetent. A third said it’s the cover-your-arse principle in operation: ask for anything that comes to mind to cover yourself, just in case. 

What’s worse, all three said, the bosses are unaware of what these notices contain. So while everyone curses them, the anonymous one in the lower echelons feels he or she has done a good day’s work. But it’s the boss who gets the blame. 

I don’t know the real reasons but I do have three suggestions in this regard. One is that no information should be sought that the government itself can’t provide, either because the information does not exist or because of the time and cost involved. For example, can it tell parliament who legally owns Ashok Hotel in New Delhi and can it provide the relevant papers? 

The second suggestion is that there should be a thorough overhaul of the system so that there’s some logic and relevance to the information being sought. You can’t just allow some lower-rung officer to ask whatever he wants without regard to  usefulness and feasibility. These notices must be reviewed by a committee and standardised for a decade at least.

The third suggestion is that there must be a central repository into which the data, once it been collected, is uploaded and to which all ministries have access. This will prevent mindless multiple queries.