The moonlighters of India Inc are under I-T on its radar as they have not declared their income outside their salaries in their tax returns. According to multiple media reports, the income tax department has sent notices to many professionals, most of which were for financial years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.
Moonlighting was a popular practice during the pandemic (2020-2021). It was especially popular in the IT sector where people with full-time jobs were working from home while taking additional work.
The income from moonlighting was higher than the regular salary in several cases. Many of these payments were made online and some came from overseas accounts. These were detected by the tax department’s system during data scrutiny.
According to a report by the Economic Times, a senior official had said that they have discovered a large number of instances of IT, accounting and management professionals who have received monthly or quarterly payments from multiple companies but have filed income only from their full-time job in their income tax returns.
Notices have been sent in the first phase to people who have undeclared annual payments ranging from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh. Officials have reported that such instances were higher during the fiscal year 2019-2021. Reports say that 1,100 people have received a notice from the income tax department so far.
In several situations, the companies have voluntarily informed the department about involvement in similar practices by their employees. The department is expecting the number of notices to increase and is yet to analyse data for the 2021-2022 financial year.
Several cases are being looked into where cash payments were made. A senior official from the department said that people are receiving notices for incorrectly declaring their income and not for moonlighting as in several cases they were receiving double of their salary.