The finance ministry is considering a proposal to amend the income-tax return forms for certain categories of tax-payers to obtain on a voluntary basis details on selected heads of expenditure.

"Barring some kinds of return forms like Saral and Naya Saral, the other forms could contain columns for details on some expenditure such as purchase of a house or high-value consumer goods. The information on such expenditure would be purely on a voluntary basis," officials said.

"The thinking in the department is that in case an assessee wants to on his own inform the department about certain purchases, which would otherwise be captured under the Annual Information Return (AIR), then he should be allowed to do so," they said, adding that a final view on the matter was yet to be taken.

The ministry had earlier attempted such an exercise under the NDA regime when Jaswant Singh was the finance minister. At that time, the ministry had proposed inclusion of information such as expenses on credit cards under the income return form and made filing of such information mandatory. The amendments were withdrawn after the move evoked strong protests.

The finance ministry is already working on creating profiles of individual income-tax assessees by combining data from three sources -- banking cash transaction tax, the annual information returns and the e-TDS (electronic tax deducted at source). The individual profiles would help the department track the expenditure patterns of individuals and compare it with the tax paid by them.

"Since the Permanent Account Number (PAN) is a common denominator in e-TDS, BCTT and the AIR, the ministry is examining if the data from them can be used to create an individual profile of an assessee," an official said, adding that efforts were on to achieve this objective by the next fiscal.

Creation of individual profiles would allow the department to evaluate the expenditure habits of the assessee and compare it with the amount of TDS paid and also assess if the taxpayer was paying the right amount of tax.

"A larger objective in creating individual profiles is also to reduce duplication of work and make assessment less intrusive," officials said.

At present, information from AIR, BCTT and e-TDS is examined separately and notices are sent sometimes to the same individual under the three heads separately," the officials said.

The revenue department has already asked the Directorate of Income Tax (Systems) to work out a software for collating the data compiled under the three heads by the National Securities Depository Ltd.