CBDT will conduct a country-wide review of tax collection work, especially for TDS and arrears, later this week in order to shore up the direct tax revenue kitty for the financial year ending March 31.

Officials said Member (Revenue) in the Central Board of Direct Taxes, Atulesh Jindal, will hold a video conference meeting with the top brass of the Income Tax department on February 6 in order to review and fine tune the "strategy for meeting the budget collection targets particularly with regard to Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) collections."

During the meeting, the apex policy making body of the I-T department, will also analyse the payments or defaults made in case of top 300 TDS deductors in the country and "follow up action regarding launching/disposal of compounding applications in the case of TDS defaulters."

The meeting assumes significance as the CBDT is concerned over the shortfall in TDS collections as the growth under this head is less by 50 per cent this time as compared to the last period.

In the 2013-14 financial year the growth under this head was 16.73 per cent while in the current fiscal of 2014-15 the growth percentage is just 7.84 per cent.

The budgeted target under the direct tax category is fixed at Rs 7.36 lakh crore for the current fiscal (2014-15) and as per CBDT it has collected Rs 5,46,661 crore till January 23.

The meeting, according to sources, will also review the "position of current demand raised till January 31 in the case of TDS defaulters and recovery."

"The meeting will involve all the tax collection wings of the Income Tax department and it is being held as the current fiscal and the budget collection deadline is coming to an end next month. The meeting will specifically review TDS cases and instances of over Rs 1 crore default where tax deducted has not been deposited in the government account," a senior I-T officer said.

Cases of cash collection out of the total tax arrear demands will also be taken up during the meeting, the officer said.

As part of measures for augmenting TDS collections, the I-T department has decided to enhance prosecution action against large defaulters in this regard with the help of its specialised electronic database and processing centre created for this exclusive task called Central Processing Centre-TDS based in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh.

The CBDT had issued directions in this regard to the tax department earlier.

The importance of TDS collections can be gauged from the fact that this category of tax has been contributing over 37 per cent to the gross direct tax collection, emphasising its ever-growing importance in the scheme of revenue collection under this domain.