New Directive Norms of Income Tax Department

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has un-curtained two taxpayer-friendly proposals of the department, which will foresee resolution of complaints without visiting tax office along with eased the process of acquiring PAN (Permanent Account Number) card. With these new rules, Income Tax Department has instructed customer care centers to monitor complaints of taxpayers. The initiatives will benefits taxpayers in several ways.

1. The Income Tax Department has instructed Aaykar Sampark Kendras (ASK) to forward emails received from the taxpayers to range in-charges, which will be subsequently sent to jurisdictional Assessing Officers (AOs). In the past norms, these complaints were to be sent to the AO but were not monitored at various levels of hierarchy, which will now be done. In some cases, they were forwarded by the ASK to the AO through snail mail and not email, which will done in all cases now.
2. The ASKs or the income tax customer care centers are now implied to answer queries relating to status of Permanent Account Number (PAN) and Tax Deduction Account Number applications, procedure of filing of income tax and wealth tax returns, while refund related grievances and for solving of other general queries could be done over phone calls or email.
3. In order to offer quick resolution of taxpayer’s grievance/s, wherever action is required to be taken by the officers in field formation, the ASK should forward the email to respective Commissioner of Income Tax (Administration and Coordination) for further transmission to respective jurisdictional Assessing Officers for necessary action. Meanwhile, the taxpayer will also be informed so that he may do further correspondence with the concerned officer.
4. The e-Sahyog initiative inaugurated by FM Arun Jaitley on Tuesday is meant for reducing compliance cost, especially for small taxpayers. This e-Sahyog will provide an online mechanism to resolve mismatches in returns of taxpayers whose returns have not been selected for inspection, without visiting the tax office. E-Sahyog pilot project furthers CBDT’s commitment to work in an e-environment and reduces the need for the taxpayer to physically appear before tax authorities
5. In the pilot project, 91,000 income tax payers have been identified, under which the assesses would be informed through SMS and email about the mismatch and then they will have to log in to e-filing portal of the tax department to see and correct the mismatch.