Frauds using the Permanent Account Number will soon be a thing of the past, as the income tax department has decided to enhance the security features on the card.
Senior officials in the ministry of finance said this will be done by amending section 139 of the IT Act to incorporate several security features on the current laminated card.
This includes incorporating print versions that are difficult to photocopy and features like hologram to ensure that the original cannot be duplicated.
They said it has become necessary to do so since the Centre has introduced the Permanent Account Number as a common business identifier for all transaction including banking operations within the past two years.
But as the original purpose of the Permanent Account Number was expected to fairly limited, the department had not planned more security features initially.
The officials said the card which now costs about Rs 20 to produce per head, will become somewhat more expensive because of the new features.
The new card with the enhanced security features are likely to be issued by the first week of January 2003, but these will not replace the ones already in use as that will be very costly for the department. The total number of Permanent Account Number issued so far is nearly 2 crore.
The IT department feels that using PAN on all financial transactions would help it to keep a better tab on th economy and so reduce tax evasion.
The department has also been goaded into action by the reports that have come in of persons using fictitious PAN to undertake high value banking transactions.
The officials said it will be too expensive to install swipe system on PAN cards, given the fact that they are needed much less frequently than credit cards and hence would be uneconomical to install.
Following the Central government
