An official in the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), who was part of the special task force to draft the Direct Taxes Code (DTC), is just back from a short break spent largely on unwinding after 52 days of hectic work.
The eight officers were drawn from various parts of the country to prepare the over 400-page Bill tabled in Parliament on August 30. They spent, on an average, 12-14 hours in a building at Saket in south Delhi, drafting the document. “On certain days, we spent over 16 hours and there were no weekends either,” says a member of the task force.
Around a dozen members of CBDT’s tax planning and legislation wing provided the critical link between the task force and the finance ministry.
Though DTC was in the pipeline for several years, it was only in July that the revenue department actually started work on drafting the Bill. And, to its surprise, it realised that retired law ministry personnel were unable to keep the language simple. “They are used to preparing the Bills in a different way. But the whole idea of DTC was to make things simple for the taxpayer and do away with provisions that run into several pages with a host of sub-clauses,” said a senior revenue department official.
The DTC Bill tabled in Parliament does not have even a single proviso, unlike the Income-Tax Act, which has 16 provisos in one particular section.
That’s when the task force, comprising young officers from the Income Tax Department, was set up. Actual work could not begin till the government received feedback, for which the last date was June 30.
With just two months at their disposal, what helped the members of the task force was their prior experience, as most of them had worked in CBDT’s tax planning and Legislation (TPL) wing and were familiar with drafting tax law.
There were special presentations before the Finance Minister and even the Prime Minister and these inputs were communicated to the special draftsmen. “It was not easy since decisions were communicated even at the last moment. A lot of it came in parts. So, every time you got something, the numbering in the Bill needed to be revised,” said an official.
In any case the task was not easy for CBDT, either. After all, when work started, it had received 1,600 comments, many of these running into several pages. Besides, comments kept pouring in even when actual drafting had started. So, it was finally decided to leave some of it for the Parliamentary standing committee, which will now look into the Bill.
When asked to comment, Revenue Secretary Sunil Mitra said it was a special effort from the members of the task force and TPL that made it possible for the government to introduce the Bill. “An extraordinary degree of motivation and commitment on the part of our officers and their counterparts in the law ministry allowed us to meet a near impossible schedule… To be able to have it vetted from the legislative point of view, to have it translated and yet have it introduced in Parliament in a span of exactly two months, our team has done a tremendous job,” Mitra said.
“Had we got one more month, we could have drafted a better Bill,” says a member of the task force.
But with this job done, some members are now looking for their next assignment.
