Finance Minister P Chidambaram's Budget speech for 2004-05 shows there were only 27 million taxpayers in the country on the date of the presentation of the Budget.

This indicates the tax evasion rampant in the country. The finance minister, in his later speeches, has expressed concern regarding black money and is reported to be toying with the idea of taking steps in this direction, including floating amnesty schemes or issue of bonds.

Unfortunately, in the past, for checking evasion, stress had mostly been on legislative measures, forgetting that equal importance is to be given to administrative aspects.

In the discussion to follow, some suggestions for checking evasion, through legislation, and for improving compliance to tax laws are being mentioned. As indicated earlier, the problems need to be tackled in two ways -- by legislation and taking effective administrative measures.

A number of countries have incorporated provisions in their tax laws to check unintended use of tax laws to avoid payment of legitimate taxes.

Laws of countries like Argentina and Australia contain provisions to check tax avoidance through transfer pricing and cross-border transactions, which are not arms length deals.

In Malaysia, legislation permits the revenue authority to disregard or verify a transaction that is believed to have the effect of tax avoidance. Some countries follow 'group' taxation system to avoid tax pilferage.

The German income tax law has anti-abuse rules, which provide for ignoring unjustified reduction brought about in withholding taxes under a treaty or directive shopping.

In Hong Kong, wholly artificial or fictitious motivated transactions, including cross-border big ticket leasing can be disregarded. Similar provisions can be incorporated in our tax laws too to plug revenue leakage caused through crafty manoeuvres.

Other measures for checking tax evasion through legislation could be:

• Taxing big and prosperous agriculturists' incomes and wealth.
• Introducing donee-based gift tax.
• Permitting tax officials to have power of door-to-door survey.
• Claims for losses/expenses relating to undisclosed or illegal incomes should not be recognised for tax assessments while taxing incomes from such sources.
• In countries like Belgium, Greece and France, there is provision for confiscation of personal rights like arms or driving licence of persons found guilty of dealing with black money or resorting to tax evasion. Similar law should be made in India too. Such persons should also be debarred from holding any elective offices, including directorships in companies.

More emphasis must be laid on these aspects instead of floating amnesty schemes and issuing bearer bonds. It needs to be borne in mind that such schemes merely tackle, that too, to a very limited extent, the problem relating to 'stock' concept in black money and do not provide solutions for checking the onslaught of black money generation -- the flop concept.

Among administrative aspects, strict measures can only create impact. Some suggestions in this context are:

• Tax laws should permit wide publicity through media regarding persons found guilty of tax evasion.
• Social conscience needs to be aroused amongst people against tax evasion, for attaching social stigma for tax evaders and to work as sentinels for identifying black marketers and tax dodgers.

The most important measure for checking evasion is to establish credibility of the government regarding its own integrity before exhorting persons to pay their taxes correctly. Some other measures, of an administrative nature, could be:

• Disentitling tax evaders/defaulters to avail of the facility of payment of taxes in the instalments and getting credit facilities from banks.
• Streamlining procedure for speedy determination of tax disputes. Special courts for this need to be set up.
• Paying special attention towards training for detection of tax frauds, evasion and black money generation, including deputation of IT officers to other countries for training to tackle cross border tax evasion.
• Providing adequate security to tax officials, conducting search and surveys.
• Improving morale of the tax department officials by providing them adequate infrastructure and other facilities, by recognition of their merit and giving hem the place that they deserve in the overall government set up.

There had been umpteen talks and voluntary disclosure schemes in the past for checking evasion and black money, but no perceivable results have come. Rather, the quantum of black money in circulation has increased substantially in volume.

Hence, some really effective steps -- nor merely talk -- are necessary to check black money. Hence, people would watch with great interest whether the present finance minister would score on a wicket, where his predecessors have either retired hurt or had been able to score zero or very few runs.