Need to move towards tech-driven tax administration: FM

"We will have to get each one of the 28 lakh tax deductees (under TDS). The tax amount would be credited to the government and refund would be credited to the deductee. And this can be done only if we move to technology," Chidambaram said.

"Income tax department is moving towards information technology. This will process TDS returns, capture massive data so that government gets revenue and taxpayer gets

refund," he said.

The Finance Minister was speaking to reporters after inaugurating the Centralised Processing Cell (CPC) of the Income Tax department here. The CPC would process all Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) applications and would help ease the

compliance procedure for taxpayers.

"We have around 28 lakh deductees, of which only 14 lakh people have filed return. The other 14 lakh do not file return. We do not know whether they are filing TDS,"

Chidambaram said.

A technology driven tax administration would assist the tax deductor, tax collector and also the payee, he said, adding it will help all the three get linked to each other without being manually involved in the process.

The target for collection of direct taxes for the current fiscal is fixed at Rs 5,70,251 crore, a 15 per cent growth over the previous year target.

The gross collection of direct taxes stood at over Rs 4.55 lakh crore during the April-January period of

... contd.