You might not have heard of Finance Ministry’s Project Insight, but if you are a successive tax evader, you are likely to experience this new intiative by the finance ministry soon. Finance Ministry’s Project Insight is the flagship project initiated by the ministry with an aim to widen the tax base by capturing the tax evaders with the help of technology.
The Finance Ministry has drifted a tender that is worth more than Rs 150 crore to acquire the data analytics software and infrastructure that will go along with it, claimed a person familiar with the matter. The ministry has attached a non-disclosure agreement as well to the tender in order to keep the precise details of the project from leaking.
This Finance Ministry’s Project Insight is expected to rank the tax evaders on the basis of the amount of tax that can be recovered so that the authorities can go after the highest value targets initially, revealed the person.
As per a report by the Parliament’s standing committee on finance in April, the challenges faced in widening the tax base that are proposed to be taken care of under Project Insight will leverage alert management, data analytics and case analytics capabilities in order to prepare the case profiles and choose the appropriate intervention.
The Finance Ministry’s Project Insight will keep a track on the Permanent Account Numbers that are being quoted on the financial transactions and also tally the same with the income tax filings. It is believed to automate several process that took too much of time previously and hence, speed up the resolution of many cases pertaining to tax evasion, claimed the official. An advertisement claims that the representatives of the bidders can collect the same by submitting a letter of authorization, a pre-bid integrity pact and non-disclosure agreement.
The Directorate of Income Tax has come up with ads for the recruitment of staff for this project. The project will put together data mining, predictive modeling, master data management, enterprise data warehouse, data exchange, case analytics, centralized processing and compliance management abilities.
Going by the letter, the project might restrict the interest of the potential buyers. AS per Neel Ratan, the leader of the government and public sector PwC India, the interest in the industry on requesting for the projects with back end payment is quite low.
