Computerisation of the Income-Tax Department has played a key role in raising tax compliance and higher tax collections over the past few years.

Backed by technology, the Central Board of Direct Taxes is now undergoing a comprehensive business process re-engineering exercise that will allow the income-tax officers to focus on scrutiny and data instead of getting bogged down with routine paper-work, Ajai Singh, member (legislation and computerisation), told Business Standard. Excerpts:

What is the status of computerisation programme?

To centralise processing, there were three big pieces in the whole exercise. The primary data centre has been set up in Delhi, a business continuity site at Mumbai and a disaster recovery site at Chennai.

This comprises the essential hardware that will become the core of the entire back-office transaction processing and remote transaction processing. This in effect means that distributed processing, which was going on at 33 data centres, will be shut down incrementally.

All the 13,000 users of the department's internal network can work on a single database for processing transactions. All offices in 540 cities have been connected to the central system. This makes a complete private network for the department.

In addition, the key thing is to transfer the legacy data to the national data centre, a process that will start from June and be over in six to eight months. The department now needs a robust software system. A consultant's report on business process re-engineering has come and we will soon invite tenders. We hope the new software will be ready by the year-end.

What changes does the report propose?

The CBDT is still examining and considering the broad parameters. The broad change that will happen is that we will be setting up central return processing facilities to separate routine, bulk work like processing of returns from higher value work like dealing with tax policy and increasing compliance.

Currently, the same set of people are doing both these jobs. This consumes all our administrative resources on the ground. So, we are planning to transfer the processing work to back offices � the first of which will come up at Bangalore.

Work like return processing, accounts, refunds and storage of records will be done at these centres. Our income-tax offices will act as front offices for interfacing with taxpayers and meeting their needs.

The front and back-end offices will be networked. We are looking at outsourcing data management. So, we will have a system where we de-congest our front-end, improve the operational efficiency of front offices, and improve the capacity of the department and tax collections.

How many central processing centres will be set up?

We are now setting up a pilot central processing centre at Bangalore. After stabilising it, we will replicate it at the four metros. We are also looking at scanning of returns by a third party vendor.

Are you planning to expand the refund banker scheme to more cities?

Currently, the refund banker scheme is available in six cities. It is still stabilising. It takes an average 30 days from the date of communication from the department to the banker. We are trying to cut this to seven days. There are many factors like frequent address changes or wrong PAN number in the returns that delay refunds.

Why is the securities transaction tax data not being utilised?

We are utilising all the data. But, we have more data than resources. Assessing officers have to process over 30 million returns, issue refunds and address tax administration issues. So, we are trying to improve the computer-aided system. If I can handle only 100 cases, I will pick up the 100 most significant ones, where tax evasion may be higher, to focus on.