New Real Time Account Cash Transactions Monitoring by Income Tax Department in India: Facts

Story:

IMPORTANT NOTICE :

Income Tax department has added a new window in their I.T. E-FILING WEBSITE viz ” ACCOUNT CASH TRANSACTIONS ” , from today morning…..!!!!!
The moment CASH is deposited into your Bank a/c , the amount will immediately reflect in this WINDOW of the I.T. Department. All the Banks Server’s have been linked with the CPU of I.T. Department for CASH transactions….!!!!!

Please SHARE this msg….!!!!!

Analysis:

The message that circulated on WhatsApp and other social networking websites in India post Demonetization in November 2016 warns people that Income Tax Department in India has added a new window in their I.T. e-filing website called “Account Cash Transactions”. It is said that the moment you deposit cash in your bank account, the amount will reflect immediately in the new window feature of the I.T. Department, and that they have access to all banks servers. As detailed below, the claim is only partially fact.

Screenshot of IT Department e-filing website

Accounts with Cash Transactions, New Feature

After banning the high denomination notes of 500 and 1000 rupees in India on 8 November 2016, the citizens were asked to deposit (and/or exchange) the cash in these denominations in their bank accounts over a period of time. As a part of their data matching exercise, the Income Tax Department identified bank accounts that have large value cash transactions, the details of which are visible under “Compliance” section of the e-filing portal of the related persons. Once you login your account on the IT e-filing website incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in, you can see the link to new feature ‘Accounts with Cash Transactions’ under ‘Compliance’ section. The IT department has added this new feature for tax payers to explain large (substantial) cash deposits in all the bank accounts, and state whether the amounts have been included in income-tax returns (ITR) or not. For this, the taxpayer has to explain (large) cash deposits in all his bank accounts separately, the detailed procedure of which is explained on Tax Guru website taxguru.in.

The new feature was significant after demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in November 2016. The tax department has mentioned that cash deposits below Rs 2.5 lakhs will not come under the scanner, and all those above will be correlated with their income-tax returns (ITR) and a penalty would be imposed in case of tax evasion.

The Misinformation

As explained above the ‘Accounts with Cash Transactions’ is a new feature introduced by IT Department in India in their IT e-filing website; it is not a new real time ‘window’ that opens in the IT Department the moment you deposit cash into your bank account. There will be millions of transactions in real time, and monitoring all of them would be difficult. However, all bank accounts linked to an individual’s permanent account (PAN) number have been collated, indicating that tax authorities are monitoring the accounts.