Faced with an acute shortage of 27,000 tax officials and assistants, the Income Tax (I-T) department is planning to take up the matter with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the annual conference of chief commissioners and director-generals of income tax next month.
The manpower of the I-T department has remained stagnant at about 60,000 people since 1996, even as the number of tax payers has increased threefold to about 33 million in the last 15 years.
“In the meeting of chief commissioners on June 9-10 we will make a proposal to the finance minister to add more people to the department. We have over 73 lakh pieces of information relating to high value transaction worth Rs 100 lakh crore. This can’t be converted into revenue due to manpower shortage. If the strength of the I-T department is increased, direct tax collections could even surpass the Budget estimate of Rs 4,30,000 crore this year,” said a finance ministry official who did not want to be named.
The department needs to add about 3,000 tax officials, 8,000 inspectors and 16,000 tax assistants. Of about 8,600 officials it has now, only 3,500 are deployed for tax assessment, while the rest are posted in the other sections of the department such as head office, investigation, data collection.
Another official said the actual manpower of the I-T department is even less than the sanctioned 59,682. About 15 years ago, when there were just 11 million taxpayers, the sanctioned manpower was 62,000 and the department was almost full. “With the current strength, one official has to scrutinise an average of 270 cases a year, which is less than the number of working days in a year. Globally, the average is 60 tax audits per official in a year,” he added.
The Standing Committee on Finance, in its 12th report, had acknowledged there was an acute manpower shortage at almost all levels in the department and the government needed to take urgent steps to address the problem. Working strength of additional and joint commissioners is 34 per cent less than the sanctioned strength, while in case of deputy and assistant commissioners the shortage is 24 per cent. The working strength of inspectors is also short by 11 per cent.
“During evidence, revenue secretary, while conceding that it would be their biggest problem stated that in the last three-four years intake of assistant commissioners was reduced to 25 or 30 per cent per year, which was a mistake. The committee couldn’t but express their concern over the apathetic attitude of the ministry towards manpower planning in I-T department,” the standing committee noted.
The staff strength of I-T department had come down to 58,000 in 2001, following which the finance ministry moved a Cabinet proposal for adding more people to the department. In 2006, the Cabinet sanctioned 7,000 people more, of which only 3,500 have been recruited so far.
