Income Tax Department Building. (Express Photo by Vasant Prabhu) Income Tax Department Building. (Express Photo by Vasant Prabhu)

Income Tax Department on Friday launched the second phase of Operation ‘Clean Money’ to detect the flow of black money into the banks after demonetisation of higher currency notes announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8 last year. The department seeks to issue notices to 60,000 entities regarding the same. According to Central Board of Direct Taxation (CBDT), the I-T dept has detected unaccounted income worth Rs 9,334 crore after the demonetisation till February 28th, 2017.

“More than 60,000 persons, including 1,300 high risk persons, have been identified for investigation into claims of excessive cash sales during the demonetisation period. More than 6,000 transactions of high value property purchase and 6,600 cases of outward remittances shall be subjected to detailed investigations (under Operation Clean Money II). “All the cases where no response is received shall also be subjected to detailed enquiries,” the CBDT said.

The CBDT added in the statement, that the ‘Operation Clean Money’ is being conducted by the tax department through use of advanced data analytics allowing “optimisation of government resources and causing minimum inconvenience to the taxpayers”. It also said the impact of the decision is already visible as the government has seen an increase of 21.7 per cent in the returns of income received in Financial Year 2016-17. Besides, sixteen per cent growth in gross collection was seen, the highest in the last five years, 14 per cent growth in net collection- the highest in last three years and above 18 per cent, 25 per cent and 22 per cent growth in personal income tax, regular assessment tax and self-assessment tax respectively.

The statement added that the note ban move was clearly aimed at checking and eliminating black money that casts a long shadow of parallel economy on our real economy” and the latest operation is one of the major steps aimed to achieve this goal and also

widen the tax base.

According to an earlier report by news agency PTI, the department, in its search, is likely to ignore standalone deposits below Rs 5 lakh. The Department, during its search, analysed accounts which showed a regular pattern of deposits and tried to link individuals with multiple accounts or PAN numbers who have deposited large sums of money.

In the initial phase of the operation, launched by the department in January, the department went through e-verification of large cash deposits into the banks after the demonetisation. The department identified at least 18 lakh people whose cash transactions appeared to have discrepancies.

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