Finance Minister P. Chidambaram today said that there is need to move towards a technology driven tax administration and called on all assesses to file the tax returns.

“We will have to get each one of the 28 lakh tax deductees (under TDS). The tax amount would be credited to the Government and the refund would be credited to the deductee. And this can be done only if we move to technology,” Chidambaram said.

“The Income-Tax Department is moving towards information technology. This will process TDS returns, capture massive data so that the Government gets revenue and the taxpayer gets refund,” he said.

The Finance Minister was speaking to reporters after inaugurating the Centralised Processing Cell (CPC) of the Income-Tax Department. The CPC would process all the tax deducted at source (TDS) applications and would help ease the compliance procedure for taxpayers.

“We have around 28 lakh deductees, of which only 14 lakh people have filed returns. The other 14 lakh do not file returns. We do not know whether they are filing TDS,” Chidambaram said.

A technology driven tax administration would assist the tax deductor, tax collector and also the payee, he said, adding that it will help all the three get linked to each other without being manually involved in the process.

Direct tax collection

The target for direct tax collection for the current fiscal is fixed at Rs 5,70,251 crore, a 15 per cent growth over the previous year.

Gross collection of direct taxes stood at over Rs 4.55 lakh crore during the April-January period of the current fiscal against Rs 4.25 lakh crore in the same period in 2011-12.

Till mid-December of the current fiscal, the revenue department had refunded Rs 57,000 crore against Rs 70,000 crore in the same period of the previous financial year.

Fiscal deficit

Faced with widening fiscal deficit, the Government had earlier issued a stern warning to tax evaders, asking them to disclose their correct income and pay advance tax by due date or be prepared to face action.

Despite slowdown in economic activities, the Government has said it is confident of meeting the Rs 5.7-lakh-crore direct tax target for the fiscal. Direct taxes include income-tax, corporate tax and wealth tax.