Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has announced on Saturday that a total black money of Rs. 65,250 crore have been evoked after the first quarter of the Income Declaration Scheme ended on September 30, 2016. Arun Jaitley informed that 64,275 people have declared a collective amount of Rs. 65,250 crore, which is planned to be used for social security purposes. He also said the figures may go up as soon as all the declarations, filed online and manually, are compiled together. Adding that “Rs 8,000 crore have been assessed out of HSBC list,” Jaitley also said that the government had taken various steps to unearth black money at the “domestic and foreign level.”
Central Board of Direct Taxes chairperson Rani S Nair said, “We expect tax collection of Rs 30,000 crore from the IDS declarations.” But IDS provided an opportunity to people to convert their illegal income and assets clean by declaring them under the four-month window and pay 45% tax and penalty.
Prime Minister congratulated Revenue Secretary Dr. Hasmukh Adia and Central Board of Direct Taxes chairperson Rani Nair on twitter by saying, “Their team had put tremendous effort into all aspects relating to IDS-2016.” Nair responded to the wish by saying that, “He was “grateful” to PM Modi for congratulating him.”
Jaitley said that “IDS 2016 was not an amnesty scheme like VDIS of 1997 as the government didn’t intend to benefit non-tax compliant vis-a-vis tax compliant. the outcome of IDS 2016 is a positive sign as more and more people were becoming tax compliant.”
He also added that “The government had conducted search operations to uncover black money. Rs. 56,378 crore- undetected income has been uncovered through search operations.” “Roughly, the declarations work out to Rs 1 crore per declarant. Some will be higher, some will be lower,” he said, without naming anyone. Arun Jaitley also cleared that the money collected would go into the Consolidated Fund of India and will be used for social security purposes. And at the same time he assured that, “We won’t give any specific information on tax declarants.”
It is great that our country is changing and people are taking responsibility of their black money. Hopefully the amount collected could be of lot more use for the economically challenged section of the society.
