Compliance cost

Tax authorities must explain their data demands

A recent tweet from a government public information account listed a set of measures to widen the tax base, leading to considerable interest and alarm among taxpayers. The aim of the new measures is to increase the scope of monitoring high-value transactions by the income-tax (I-T) department. Several such transactions were listed — for example, health insurance premium payments over Rs 20,000 and hotel payments more than the same amount. There was some initial concern that this would vastly increase the compliance burden on taxpayers, which probably led to the initial tweet on the subject being deleted. Since then the