Faceless assessment may put an end to people dodging income tax notices

Revenue department identifies people who have ignored notices calling for enquiry and verification of tax returns.

A new faceless tax assessment system will make it difficult for people to dodge questions about their declared incomes not matching with financial transactions, said sources in the department of revenue.

The department has identified people who have ignored notices calling for enquiry and verification of tax returns. However, now it would be difficult for them to avoid outreach of the department as the technology-driven faceless assessment scheme has been operationalised, they said.

Sources said people in some 6,000 cases have not responded to notices.

Earlier, in pre-faceless era, may be such tactics of being non-responding have possibly paid dividends for tax evader but now with the faceless assessment scheme, the Income Tax department collates and matches transactions with the ITRs of taxpayers/entities and selects tax returns for scrutiny that show wide discrepancies in financial transactions versus the income shown in the tax returns.

These discrepancies are unearthed by application of risk analysis developed through artificial intelligence as well as from the experiential and domain knowledge of the tax officials, said sources.