Transparent Taxation – Honouring the Honest

In the era of structural reforms, Indian Government has been taken several measures to rebuild the pandemic-hit economy therefore to carry forward these reforms further our Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi introduced a new platform to benefit honest taxpayer and reducing the compliance burden of Taxpayer naming “Transparent Taxation – Honouring the Honest”

Some key highlights of today speech have been mentioned hereunder: 

• As per Prime Minister Modi the taxpayer is now assured of fair, courteous and rational behaviour. Taxpayer shall be provided with a fair and just system for tax compliances.
• The concept of faceless assessments and taxpayer charter shall be initiated from today, this step will help to reduce government interference, bureaucratic discretion and further, will increase the trust in the taxpayer and reward the honest tax payer.
• In Budget Speech of 2020 our Hon’ble Finance Minister Nirmala Seetharaman has promised to introduce faceless appeals soon and in todays speech Prime Minister said that the faceless appeals shall be initiated from 25^th September 2020.
• Tax scrutiny can be assigned to any officer in any city in India to ensure that it doesn’t matter who the taxpayer is or who the assessee is. This will reduce the chances of corruption since the possibility of familiarity or influence will be zero.
• CBDT has clarified today that all assessment orders shall be passed by National e-Assessment Centre through faceless assessment scheme, 2019, except in following cases where:

2. Cases are assigned to Central Charges.
3. Cases assigned to International Tax Charges
   • Any assessment order passed by any other mode except mode prescribed in above condition shall be considered as non-est. and shall be deemed to have never been passed.
   • Technology will be used to reduce direct interaction with the Officials of Tax Department. This will reduce under the table transactions and create transparency.
   • Also, due to this technology driven system of assessments, the number of scrutinise have come down to a fourth in the last 8 years.

Due to negative impact of Covid-19, economy of almost every country has been affected but our Prime Minister has been very instrumental and taking aggressive measures consistently to revive our economy from these financial crises. We hope that these measures will be implemented without any hurdles and it will benefit the common man and honest taxpayers.

Source:  F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I