Budget 2018: Permanent account number (PAN) is a significant valuable and security of it is an utmost thing. The misuse of PAN details of assesees is prevalent since long and there is a need to provide new age chip enabled PAN cards so as to prove the identity of the concerned person rather than using the photo copy of the card, according to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). “Recently, a number of cases have come to the notice where the PAN of the assessees used at Photo ID was publically available at places like railway stations (in charts) are found to be misused and quoted in the TDS/TCS returns. eg The Finance Act, 2012 through an amendment in section 206C made it mandatory to collect tax at specified rate in case of any person selling jewellery or bullion,” the renowned chartered accountants body said.
ICAI has said, “the seller in this case has to file TCS returns quarterly where currently PAN of all the buyers need to be reported. In order to hide/accommodate the information w.r.t the high net worth individuals not quoting their PAN at the time of purchase in order to evade tax, fake PANs are being mentioned in the TCS returns. Such sellers are able to get the PAN numbers by various means as mentioned above.” “In such cases, the asseessee whose PAN has been quoted faces severe hardship as he may not have that much income to substantiate the expenditure quoted against his PAN. It will also be difficult for him to prove his innocence. Thus, there is a need to curb such practice and new age PAN cards be issued in order to prove the identity of the person carrying the transaction. fake PANs are being mentioned,” it said.
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ICAI has recommended that to curb the misuse of PAN card to carry out benami transactions, it should be made chip enabled and required swiping in the machines specifically designed for it so that the transactions carried on by him are recorded in the same and the assessee is able to prove the transactions entered into by him.
Earlier, the Government had issued newly designed PAN (Permanent Account Number) cards that have added security features to make them tamper-proof and with contents written in both Hindi and English, a senior Income-Tax Department official said on Friday. The new-look PAN cards were printed by NSDL and UTIITSL (UTI Infrastructure Technology and Services Ltd).
The government has made it mandatory to link existing Aadhaar numbers with PAN of taxpayers. Amending income tax rules and notifying the same, the government has made quoting of the 12-digit biometric Aadhaar or the enrolment ID a must at the time of application of permanent account number (PAN).
