Tax terrorism is thriving

There are cases of taxpayers being forced to pay 20 per cent of disputed demands

Union minister, Arun Jaitley, in his avatar as finance minister, had coined the very apt term – tax terrorism – in 2014 to describe the last years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The tax department, in those days, twisted every possible arm (without bothering about legality) and brought in retrospective amendments to try and win the Vodafone battle by the back door despite losing in the Supreme Court. At that time, Jaitley had mentioned that the utter failure to bring new taxpayers into the net had resulted in unreasonable tax demands from existing taxpayers to meet equally unreasonable