8/16/2019 CAG 15
1/1
FY 2014-15,” the CAG reporton direct taxes said.
The reasons behind thedues being difficult to recoverinclude
inadequate assets forrecovery, cases under liquida-tion, assessee
not being trace-able and the demand for taxeshaving been stayed by
variousauthorities, according to thereport.
“The recovery mechanismis deficient as certified de-mand
remaining uncollectedincreased to Rs 2.4 lakh crorein FY 2014-15
from Rs 2.2 lakhcrore in FY 2013-14,” the re-port added.
A separate report tabled inParliament by the CAG onservice taxes
castigated theFinance Ministry and in par-ticular the Central Board
of Excise and Customs (CBEC)for failing to ensure a
highstandard of data to do withservice tax.
“The Ministry could notprovide data related to de-tailed
scrutiny of returns anddisposal of refund cases forFY15 as the
format of data andresponsibility to maintain the
data were revised from No-vember 2014. This indicatesthat
continuity of mainte-nance of critical data is notensured during
change man-agement in the CBEC,” theservice tax report said.
The report also found that,while the CBEC had provideddata on
various performanceparameters such as scrutinyof returns, refunds,
arrears re-alisation, internal audit, etc,the figures provided did
notmatch the information fur-nished during the last auditreport of
2015.
“There is an urgent need toimprove the quality of
datamaintenance in respect of service tax,” the report
added.
Apart from this, the reportalso found that the issue of ar-rears
remaining uncollectedplagued Service Tax as well.
NEW DELHI: Over 96 percent of the Rs 7 lakh crore
of outstanding direct tax duesare “difficult to recover”,
ac-cording to a Comptroller andAuditor General (CAG) re-port tabled
in Parliament onFriday. A separate report bythe CAG strongly
reprimand-ed the service tax collectiondepartment for not
maintain-ing accurate and updated re-cords.
While pending total directtaxes rose from Rs 2.91 lakhcrore in
2010-11 to Rs 7 lakhcrore by the end of financialyear 2014-15, the
amount thatis deemed difficult to recoverout of this, rose from Rs
2.71lakh crore (93 per cent) to Rs6.73 lakh crore (96 per cent)
inthe same period.
“Pending demands at theend of the year increasedmore than 2.4
times betweenFY 2010-11 and FY 2014-15. Outof total pending demand,
theIncome Tax Department indi-cated that more than 96 percent is
difficult to recover in
“It is a matter of concernthat the collection as ratio
of arrears during FY15 has fallendrastically to 1.17 per
centcompared to 10.46 per cent inFY14. Although the falling ra-tio
of collection of arrears hasbeen repeatedly pointed outin the audit
process, there isno sign of improvement.There is a need to
strengthenthe recovery mechanism of the department,” the
reportsaid.
A third CAG report, on ex-cise duty, found that the reve-nue
foregone due to the vari-ous exemptions given onexcise duty—which
is theamount the governmentwould have collected if therewere no
exemptions—fell be-low the actual central exciseduty collections
for the firsttime in five years.
“It is observed that the rev-enue foregone for FY15 in re-spect
of excise duties was Rs1,84,764 crore… which is 97.74per cent of
revenue from cen-tral excise,” the report said.The comparable
figure inFY11 was 139 per cent.
TCA SHARADR AGHAVAN
CAG finds 96 per cent of Rs.7 lakh croreof tax arrears
‘difficult to recover’
The issue of
arrears remaininguncollectedplagued ServiceTax as well
