By IANS
New Delhi : Finance Minister P. Chidambaram Wednesday directed tax officials to accept returns on trust and devise less invasive methods to check evasion while calling for a non-discriminatory and non-discretionary tax system.
The finance minister said e-filing of tax deducted at source would be made compulsory for some categories of taxpayers from Sep 1 and the number of banks that can collect e-taxes will be soon expanded from the current five.
Significant progress has also been made in the area of tax recovery in the past four years and cumulative tax arrears have actually declined for the first time in 35 years, he said at an annual meeting with senior income tax officials.
In order to make the process of scrutiny less invasive and transparent, the tax department had moved towards a system of selecting such cases through a computer-aided system, he added.
Chidambaram also expressed confidence that during the current fiscal, direct tax collections would grow 16.3 percent given a forecast of nine percent expansion in the Indian economy.