Taxmen to get ‘random’ tax cases

New Delhi, Sept. 17: To check corruption and harassment, the tax department will soon launch a pilot of “jurisdiction-free assessment” where an officer will not get to know identity of the assessee as allotment of cases will be done randomly by computers rather than on the basis of area.

The success of the pilot, to be first carried out in New Delhi and Mumbai, will determine if the plan has to be expanded all over the country, an official said. The country is divided into 18 tax zones. Taxpayers are assessed by the officers of the region they are based in.

Under the new system, the assessment zones will be demolished and a special computer software will allocate a taxpayer to any officer anywhere in the country, he said.

The identities of the taxpayer and his assessing officer will be hidden in a bid to check corruption and harassment assessees face at the hands of overzealous officers.

The department is working on a major reform initiative to make compliance taxpayer friendly and a 13member committee of tax officers has been formed to look into implementation issues, the official said.

But before the countrywide launch, the pilot is being run to spot implementation issues. “After you initiate jurisdiction free assessment, a taxpayer might say he wants to meet the tax officer face to face and explain his case. What do we do in that case? Can we deny the taxpayer an option to meet his assessment officer? Say, we allow them to have video conferencing, then we will have to set up the facility in the offices,” he said.