Delhi resident Madan Kumari Jain is a conscientious citizen. She earns a steady income and pays her taxes religiously. In 2010-11, she paid Rs 2.01 lakh in tax. A year before that, she enriched the IT department by Rs 2.05 lakh. In fact she has made the exchequer richer by a million rupees in the past five years. Nothing unusual about it except for the fact that Jain died in 2007. A query under the RTIAct has revealed that many dead people continue to pay income tax in India. 

In Mumbai, a unit of the IT office received Rs 4.05 crore as tax from dead assessees in the past five years. In the same period, a Ranchi unit received Rs 27 lakh from seven deceased tax payers. The IT office in Allahabad has two dead taxpayers on its rolls. 

The IT office allows a legal heir or the executor of a will to settle tax liabilities on behalf of a deceased person, but does not place a cap on the number of years a dead person's tax file can be kept active. "We do not have information on the system about such cases. There is no way to find the number of dead people who have filed taxes," said Krishna Rao, commissioner of the central processing centre of the IT department, Bangalore. 

The RTI query was filed by activist Rajiv Singhal, ex-president of the Bharat Merchants' Chamber, in all IT circles, in March. He received 1,150 replies, with IT officials acknowledging in most cases that they were aware of the practice, but didn't have information about taxes being paid on behalf of dead people. (Times of India)