Driver gets ₹20-cr tax shock, blames employer

A driver in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur was shocked when an income-tax notice asked him to explain ₹20 crore worth of transactions in his bank account over the last one year.

Narpat Lal, alias Naresh Joshi, was also asked to explain a deposit of ₹49 lakh. It was this deposit made three days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced scrapping of 500 and 1,000-rupee banknotes that caught the attentions of tax authorities, who are examining all suspicious high-value transactions after the November 8 demonetisation announcement.

A worried Joshi, whose earns around ₹10,000 every month, went to police on April 12 and lodged a complaint of fraud and cheating against a Jodhpurbased diamond dealer who was his employer for a year.

“I have been a driver for last 20 years but none of my employers except Aditya Lodha took photocopies of my identity documents and PAN card. I am sure he used these to open a bank account in my name,” Joshi told HT over phone from Jodhpur on Friday.

Joshi, who worked as Lodha’s driver and office boy in 2012-13, said he got to know about the account when he received the notice in February.

He went to tax authorities who said they were looking into the complaint but when nothing came of it, he turned to police.

“I went to the police commissioner’s office and told him about the fraud,” he said.

Police have lodged an FIR against Lodha and asked the bank for an account statement.

Lodha opened a trading company, Sai Impex, in his name, Sardarpur police station in-charge Bhupendra Singh told HT, quoting Joshi’s complaint. The account, too, was in the company’s name and was opened in the Sardarpura branch of Punjab National Bank in 2015.

Since demonetisation, authorities have come across instances of shell companies and Jan Dhan accounts, or zerobalance accounts, being used to hide illicit income to escape tax scrutiny.

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