Govt launches 'Op Clean Money'-II;to probe high risk people

After a lukewarm response to the income declaration scheme under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, the government Friday launched its second phase to probe more than 60,000 entities including 1,300 “high risk” persons with excessive cash sales or deposits during the demonetisation period.

In the second phase of 'Operation Clean Money' to detect illicit cash, those individuals will be probed who have not responded to the tax department for queries or notices served on them.

The income tax department said more than 6,000 transactions of high value property purchase and 6,600 cases of outward remittances will also be subjected to detailed investigations.

“All the cases where no response is received shall also be subjected to detailed enquiries,” the CBDT said in a statement.

In the first phase, the tax department detected undisclosed income of over Rs 9,334 crore between November 9, 2016 and February 28 this year.

“The operation has moved into the next phase with identification of high risk persons for detailed investigations by the income tax department,” it said, adding the identification has been done through use of advanced data analytics, including integration of data sources, relationship clustering and fund tracking.

The high risk categories include businesses claiming cash sales as the source of cash deposits which is found to be excessive compared to their past profile or industry norms, large cash deposits made by government or PSU employees, persons who have undertaken high value purchases during the period persons who have used shell entities for layering of funds, and where no responses were received.

The tax department said that the complete exercise of examining all the doubtful and non-tax compliant accounts may take more than one year but with the help of technology and continuous enforcement action all the liable accounts will be brought to tax.

The first phase of the money cleanup operation was launched at the end of January this year and over 17 lakh individuals were investigated out of whom over 9 lakh people have responded to the department.


Deccan Herald News Service