Rs 14,000 crore worth properties under scanner of income-tax department

The Income Tax department, on Thursday, released a statement that more than Rs 14,000 crore worth of properties have come under the scanner of the department that had launched a major offensive against tax evaders post demonetisation. The statement said, “The exercise has also unearthed a large number of persons and clusters having suspect transactions. These include about 14,000 properties of more than Rs 1 crore each where persons have not even filed income-tax returns. The investigations are in progress.” In the statement detailing the impact of demonetisation of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on black money, it said ‘Operation Clean Money’ was launched on January 31 to analyse data of people who deposited large sums of cash post the note-ban with no previous matching returns of income. As a result, an amount of Rs 15,496 crore was admitted as undisclosed income and surveys resulted in the seizure of Rs 13,920 crore, it said. The tax department said that in the first phase of Operation Clean Money, data analytics was used to identify 18 lakh suspect cases where cash transactions did not appear to be in line with the tax profile of depositors. Online verification was done in a record time of four weeks, it said. Using data analytics, then 13.33 lakh accounts of some 9.72 lakh people with unusual cash deposits of around Rs 2.89 lakh crore were identified and response sought. The Operation Clean Money has since moved into the next phase that “includes enforcement actions in high-risk cases, taxpayer engagement through a dedicated website in medium-risk cases and close monitoring in low-risk cases”, it said. The high-, medium- and low-risk cases have been identified using advanced data analytics, including through integration of data sources, relationship clustering and fund tracking. The department informed that post the note-ban, there has been a 158% increase in the number of searches, to 1,152 groups from 447, and more than doubling of seizures to Rs 1,469 crore from Rs 712 crore. There has also been a 38% increase in admission of undisclosed income of Rs 15,496 crore.