The government may be the biggest employer in the country, including mammoth departments like railways and defence. But the tax accrued to the exchequer from its employees is a paltry Rs 1,500 crore compared to the total revenue generated from income tax from all sectors that stands at Rs 70,000 crore.
This was revealed by R L Rinowama, Commissioner of Income Tax, Mysore sector of the Karnataka and Goa region, during his inaugural speech at a seminar on tax deducted at source (TDS) and Online Tax Accounting System (Oltas), in the City on Friday.
There were also plans to have a special directorate to closely monitor TDS sector. Also, TDS accounts for 33 per cent of the income tax collection in the country. Mysore sector, which contributes Rs 105 crore to the IT kitty through TDS, matches up to the national average and totally accounts for Rs 330 crore in income tax.
Speaking on the occasion, Srinivas Khanna, income tax officer, CTU, Bangalore, said that there was a two per cent error in entering data on income tax paid by assessees at banks. This was not only denying the assessees the credit due to them but also leading to a revenue loss to the exchequer since entries made under wrong heads would put the money paid into “suspense” or “no-man’s account.”
It was in this light that banks must take steps to bring down the number of errors, especially when the country’s IT system was entering a fully-automated era. Bankers and government employees need to equip themselves with proper information on the tax system. 
Come September, the automation would make it difficult for the department to take corrective steps for the errors.
A software that helps scan IT challans and upload data to the IT department’s centralised system, which the department suggested banks to incorporate was rejected by the latter due to its “prohibitive cost.”
Responsibility also lay with the assessees when they fill up the challans since any wrong information could even deny regions their share of the IT revenue for the development of sectors like education and roadways.