• The Hon’ble Prime Minister on 13th August, 2020 while inaugurating National E-Assessment Centre announced that henceforth there will be transparency in the department and honest tax payers will be honoured.

• He made following three announcements:-

1. Henceforth assessments will be made without personal interaction between Jurisdictional Assessing Officer and the Assessee. This will avoid pain and harassment to assesses and assessment will be finalised on merits.

2. Taxpayer’s chapter will be issued providing for obligations of the department and also of assesses.

3. With effect from 25th September all appeals before Commissioner (Appeals) shall also be faceless.

The objective of faceless assessment is to completely eliminate physical contact between the taxpayer and the taxman to make tax administration objective, transparent and corruption-free.

The system will work under the National E-Assessment Centre (NeAC) headquartered in Delhi and eight Regional E-Assessment Centres (ReACs) located in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Presently there are about 6 crores income tax assesses in India. Hence, it has been a big job to develop such a strong digital system to undertake this massive assignment. This has been achieved by the department after a long journey of computerisation of the department.

History of Computerization

Journey of computerisation had started in 1982, when DIT (Systems) was appointed in the Directorate of Income-tax (Organization and Management Services) to make co-ordinate efforts in introducing electronic data processing of the returns. Thereafter the process of computerization and adoption of electronic system continued and various activities relating to TDS, filing of returns, grant of refunds etc. were undertaken in digital form. CPC at Bengaluru and TRACES at Gaziabad are effectively working. All returns are filed electronically and are processed by CPC and refunds and demands on the basis of return are granted / raised within a short time without interface. Similarly all TDS statements are filed in electronic mode and same are processed. These steps taken had solved many problems of assesses. Details of all payments made by an assessee, whether directly or by way of TDS are now available in 26AS. Another important issue of assesses has been arbitrary assessments. Once the system for processing of returns and grant of TDS had stabilized the department had thought of expanding the same for assessments through e-proceedings.

Posted on: September 27th, 2020