Sunil Jain: e-Taxman

PERSPECTIVES

The taxman's rapidly becoming more e-savvy. The number of visitors on the tax department's site is up to around 4 lakh a day, with most of them downloading various forms and software for filing returns.

The number of TDS returns filed electronically is up from 1.28 lakh in 2002-03 to 4.58 lakh in 2004-05 and the number of returns processed on computers has gone up almost 15-fold in just the last three years, and electronic credit of refunds to bank accounts has been introduced in 12 cities.

Detailed profiles have been built up of different types of taxpayers, and computer-assisted scrutiny has been introduced in 60 places. The TIN network for reporting high value transactions with the PAN as the key identifier is in place.
 

Year	Returns processed on computers	e-TDS returns  received
2001-02	1,483,872	-
2002-03	17,927,042	128,081
2003-04	20,393,676	323,471
2004-05	20,381,992	458,402
Source: Ministry of Finance