The taxman intends to keep a close watch on large organisations like public works department, municipal corporation, railways and armed forces, which are prone to defaulting on tax deducted at source.

Revenue department officials told Business Standard that the Central Board of Direct Taxes had identified this as one of the focus areas in its action plan for the current year to bolster TDS collections.

"Organisations like municipal corporations and public works department award a lot of contracts for various activities. Field officers have been asked to ensure that TDS is duly collected on payments made for such contracts," an official said.

Similarly, large employees' organisations like the railways, armed forces and the postal department also award contracts. The armed forces also give contracts for its central supplies depots canteen. All of these had to be accounted for TDS, officials said.

The CBDT, in its action plan, last year had identified 19 activities, including payment of rent, inter-connectivity charges by mobile service providers, airing charges to TV channels for broadcasting programmes, sale of liquor to excise contractors and payment of fees by hospitals and medical institutes to consultant doctors, to check avoidance of TDS.

Officials said the CBDT had also decided that similar TDS-related cases between the board and large organisations like the Life Insurance Corporation, the State Bank of India [Get Quote] or Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd would be centralised.

A decision would then be taken between the organisation's headquarters and the tax commissioner where the headquarters are located.

"Very often, the same TDS query is raised by field offices with different branches of the company in various parts of the country.

Rather than the issue going to court from different branches, the board thinks if the TDS-related query is the same, then all such cases of a company should be centralised at the headquarters," an official said.

Officials said the thinking was that once a decision was reached between the board and the company's headquarters, the company could convey the decision to all its branches.

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