In a first, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has made public data on the total number of taxpayers in the country, income disclosed in returns by various categories of taxpayers and the number of permanent account number (PAN) holders in the country for a chosen period of time.

The department said the objective of publishing these statistics was to encourage “wider use and analysis of income tax data by departmental personnel and academicians”.

The time series data between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2015 discloses the actual direct taxes collection achieved by the income tax department; direct tax to gross domestic product ratio; the cost of collecting the revenue for the government kitty; the number of effective assesses, and workload and disposal of income tax cases.

The department has also published statistics filed by taxpayers in their returns for the assessment year 2012-13.

It also disclosed the PAN allocation across various categories and gender by the end of fiscal 2014.

“A total of 84-page data has been released and put in the public domain for the first time. A number of economists and researchers demanded that such data should be made available publicly and hence it has been uploaded on the official web portal of the department,” a senior official said.