KOLKATA: Economists in India and abroad have lauded the work of city based income tax officials in detecting gaps in tax collection. The software , which already has a pilot run in West Bengal and found gaps in tax collection, is developed by a team of Kolkata based officials led by joint commissioner of income tax Priyabrata Pramanik with the assistance of professors of Mathematics and Economics Syamali Bhadra and Tina Burma.While noted economist Sugata Marjit has described Pramanik’s research as pioneering work not done in India before, the Tax Policy Analyst of OECD in Paris has described this work as commendable, outstanding and worth emulating. He suggested that this great methodology be followed at national level also. The tax Adviser to Government of New Zealand has also described this as pioneering work.The existing tax payer base in India is 3.5 crore only out of 120 crore population. Tax Administration Reforms Commission (TARC) headed by Parthasarathi Shome in its final report submitted to Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on February 20 recommended that this tax payer base should be minimum 6 crore and ideally 12 crore considering the growth of Indian economy. TARC recommended a Sector specific tax gap analysis to unearth the potential new tax payers as well as to deepen the tax base. TARC also recommended that Indian Revenue Departments must follow the ‘Microsimulation Models’ in Revenue Forecasting and Tax Gap Analysis. In this process the revenue departments should use softwares like EVIEW, STATA etc.Anil Gupta, the international expert in Tax Gap suggested that this research be made known to World Bank, since they are the apex body giving topmost priority in finding Tax gap. Pramanik had presented the paper at a national conference on “Emerging Trends in Mathematics And Mathematical Sciences” in Kolkata. They have already used softwares EVIEW and STATA and were trying to build a Static Microsimulation Model using correlation among different parameters. They have validated the data collected from different sources and through stratified sampling.