The Income Tax Department on Thursday claimed to have busted a racket of extracting fraudulent tax refunds by employees of bellwether companies like IBM, Vodafone and Infosys in alleged connivance with a Chartered Accountant (CA) in Bengaluru, the IT capital of the country, reported by PTI.
Reportedly, the department, while conducting search on a Bangaluru based Chartered Accountant have “seized” ” bogus claim documents of his various clients along with WhatsApp chat messages.
Sources said that the CA was “found to be instrumental in filing false income tax returns and making fraudulent refund claims” by citing inflated or false claims of loss from house property.”
Allegedly, he has filed nearly 1000 returns returns with loss from house property, aggregating to loss claim of Rs 18 crore” till now and he told the department that he filed those bogus claim refunds at the “insistence of his clients”
However, the employees of large and medium sized companies, who are clients of the CA, are also under the monitoring of the income-tax department.
“It is noted that employees from some of the reputed companies such as IBM, Vodafone, Saplabs, Biocon, Infosys, ICICI Bank, CISCO, Thomson Reuters India Limited among others have also resorted to such fraudulent claim of refunds by filing revised returns of their individual income,” the department said.
The department said many of the employees it questioned, after the fraud was unearthed, said they do not have any “real loss” under the ‘income from house property’ category and the employees shifted blame on the CA saying it was the professional who said “he can get refunds for them by making some claims.”
“They also deposed that, out of the refund received, the auditor (CA) had charged 10 per cent as incidental charges.
The department has already started proceedings against the CA.
“Necessary action as per law will be taken against the CA as well as the persons who have claimed wrong refunds under the provisions of Income Tax Act,” it said
The department cautioned taxpayers from indulging or getting influenced by such frauds as it said that making claim of refunds by the taxpayer from the department is based on “trust” between the two sides and this should not be breached, the report said.
The Income Tax department now does automated and faceless return processing and issue of refunds.
