28,000 J&K Govt Employees Under I-T Department Scanner For Claiming Bogus Refunds

The employees have allegedly claimed bogus refunds worth a few crores of rupees while filing their ITRs, PTI reported citing official sources.

New Delhi: Over 28,000 government employees, including 8,000 police and paramilitary force personnel, are under the scanner of the Income-tax department in Jammu and Kashmir.

They have allegedly claimed bogus refunds worth a few crores of rupees while filing their ITRs, PTI reported citing official sources.

According to PTI, the taxman has found that this purported fraud took place during the Income Tax Returns (ITRs) filing seasons in 2020-21 and 2021-22 even as the department has registered two criminal FIRs against a Chartered Accountant (CA) and 404 other people, with the J-K Police crime branch after a similar fraud was detected for the last few fiscals.

PTI reported that the alleged irregularities came to light sometime back after the Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) wing of the department located in Srinagar found that a number of people who are assessed in the Union Territory of J-K had claimed "excessive and ineligible deductions" under various heads leading to claim of bogus refunds.

Documents accessed by PTI show that the Principal Director of I-T (J-K and Ladakh) M P Singh sanctioned filing of police FIRs against the CA and 404 other people that includes some dubious tax advisors and filers for "entering into a conspiracy and defrauding the exchequer of a sum of Rs 16.72 crore between the financial years 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20."

The department found that many among these people had filed incorrect or false ITRs and had identically claimed around Rs 4 lakh in refunds, they said.

The police has booked these people under various sections of the IPC like 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery), 471 (using a forged document as genuine), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and section 66D of the Information Technology Act (cheating by impersonation).

According to the law, if a person evades tax or mis-declares their income in the ITR they can be prosecuted and charge sheeted by the tax department under section 276C of the I-T Act that entails a rigorous imprisonment ranging from six months to seven years on a case-to-case basis.