The country has witnessed a big jump in the allotment of Permanent Account Number (PAN). According to the set of data released by the income tax department, the government has seen a huge surge of almost 2 crore PANs between Dec-2017 - March-2018.

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Central Board of direct taxes (CBDT), the custodian of all income tax and direct taxes data and policy making says that out of these 2 crore new PANs, over 1.9 crore were allotted to individuals. On the other hand, a close analyses of this data shows that over 87,000 firms were allotted PANs again during the same period.

Government which divides the society in eight broad categories like company, government, HUF etc account, says that last time over 2 crore PANs were issued in a span of three months was during the demonisation period.

When we checked the trend with the government and various tax experts and asked them as to what might have lead to this growth, they said that more & more transactions now require submission of PAN, which mean to concluded a lot of transactions one has to quote the PAN no. Not just this, GST has led to a lot more tax compliance, even the concept of presumptive tax scheme has helped bring in smaller entities within tax fold, thus which has lead to an increase in the demand for PAN numbers.

Currently India has more than 36 crore PAN holders and government aims to add more and more so that everyone is under the taxman’s vigil.

“IT Dept of late has enhanced the vigil on cash transactions, thus we have increased the enforcement of requirements of PAN for specified transactions such as mandatory quoting of PAN on cash transactions above RS 2 lakhs etc. Also more efforts for anti-blaclmoney drive and anti-cash drive have been initiated.

During Jan-March, CBDT was sending emails and sms directly to taxpayers, non-filers etc for timely filing of return. A lot of non-filers were detected in the system during Jan-March 2018 which had surfaced in our 3rd party reporting exercise, thus the increase in demand of PAN is visible,” a top IT department official said.

“More and more transactions are getting linked to PAN, government is increasing its efforts to convert the parallel economy into a formal economy. GST too has lead to more formalisation of the economy which has lead to increase in PAN being issued. Recently, to curb the use of shell companies and consequent laundering of black money, ministry of Corporate Affairs has also made reporting of Beneficial ownership mandatory along with the PAN mandatory. All these together has lead to an increase in demand of PAN,” Amit Maheshwari, partner, Ashok Maheshwary & Associates LLP said.

First Published:Aug 21, 2018 11:03 PM IST