Karnataka has pushed Tamil Nadu to the fourth slot in income-tax collections for the year ended March 2014. The first two slots are occupied by Mumbai and New Delhi regions.

Tamil Nadu, including Puducherry region, ended the year with collections of Rs.42,500 crore, marking an increase of 14 per cent over the corresponding period last year. This is the first time that collections have crossed the Rs.40,000 crore-mark and this excludes tax refund of Rs.4,500 crore. Last year, Tamil Nadu region failed to achieve its budget target collection of Rs.40,528 crore, and ended the year at Rs.37,271 crore.

Talking to The Hindu, a senior official said Karnataka, with collections of Rs.59,000 crore, overtook Tamil Nadu due to the presence of a large number of information technology firms and banks that were doing well. But Tamil Nadu suffered due to poor performances of manufacturing, automobile, leather and textile sectors. “We could easily topple Karnataka, when these sectors register higher growth volume,” he added.

According to him, Tamil Nadu region has 24 lakh assessees, of which 20.85 lakh are individuals, 1.65 lakh firms and 22,000 companies. A sum of Rs.20,000 crore was collected through tax deducted at source (TDS) and 36,000 assesses filed e-returns since January.

The official said that they had started collating information about high-value transactions from various sources, and these were cross-checked with the income-tax returns that were filed later by assesses.

He asked assessees to quote their Permanent Account Numbers (PAN) in each transaction, and mention the transaction details.