Taxation processes to be reworked

The Income Tax department is gearing towards an entire business process re-engineering of key tax processes all over India by 2006-07.

In a meeting held in Mumbai, the empowered committee set up by the Central Board of Direct Taxes and chaired by Vijay Kelkar, adviser to the finance minister, has given an in-principle approval to the preliminary report on BPR for proceeding on reengineering of the tax departments and various processes.

According to official sources, the report has recommended integration of various key processes of the Income Tax under a single technological platform to reduce time and make the delivery mechanism more efficient and transparent.

The various areas to be integrated include collection of taxes, filing of returns, assessment of cases, enforcement and dispute resolution under appeals etc.

The BPR exercise, they added, was meant to map the existing processes in the tax department and rework them to make them computer compatible, primarily to attain transparency and faster customer delivery.

From now on the committee could go in depth to assess the requirement for re-engineering and various bottlenecks in upgrading the existing technology to match the objectives in a time-bound manner of around a 24-month period.

The empowered committee comprises members of the Central Board of Direct Taxes as well as experts like Infosys, Ernst and Young etc.

While the recast of existing processes will minimise the manual intervention, there will be no tinkering with the human resources, said an official.