In a taxpayer-friendly move, the revenue department has directed its officials to fix meetings with assessees in such a manner so that they do not have to wait.

As per the current practice, tax officials call assessees for meetings at one time and they have to wait for long hours for their turn.

“We issued clear instructions that the time should be so fixed that tax payer and assessee when called for whatever reason, for adjudication/hearing, he should not be made to wait unnecessarily and for timing between two meetings there should be adequate spacing,” a top revenue department official said.

There are about 3.7 crore tax payers, while the officials from Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) are able to scrutinise only one per cent of the returns. So roughly about 3-3.5 lakh returns are being scrutinised.

The initiative forms part of the exercise to make the tax administration non-adversarial and taxpayer-friendly.

Revenue Secretary Shaktikanta Das had recently said the department’s key objective is to foster non-adversarial tax administration and towards this has tried to reduce the interface between the tax officials and assessee.

“Number of steps has been taken on non adversarial tax administration. We have had in the recent weeks discussions between the CBDT and CBEC. Very shortly we will be coming out with certain guidelines for the department officials to follow to foster a more transparent and a more non-adversarial tax administration,” he said.

The Government has targeted to raise Rs. 7.36 lakh crore from direct taxes in the current fiscal, up from over Rs. 6.36 lakh crore collected last year. (The Hindu)