Thanks to technology, the Income Tax department is now able to track all your bank accounts in all the banks in India, and show you the details on its website.
The details of your accounts can be seen on incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in — the portal used to file your income tax returns.
As of now, only those accounts which have substantial cash transactions are listed on the portal.
This is helpful to avoid fraud in the context of the ongoing crackdown on black money.
In other words, if someone else has opened a bank account in your name, or if someone else is using a bank account that you opened to turn black money into white, you can easily detect it using this facility.
The department is able to do this because all bank accounts are now linked to PAN number and banks have to report all transactions above a certain threshold.
The reporting threshold is lower for cash transactions, and higher for non-cash transactions.
In other words, if you get a NEFT credit of Rs 10 lakhs, it is likely that it will automatically be reported to the tax authorities. However, if you get a NEFT credit of Rs 50,000, it is unlikely to be. For cash, even a Rs 1 lakh credit into your account is likely to be auto reported to the tax authorities.
Similarly, banks have been instructed to report details of all accounts where the transaction value crosses a certain limit in a particular time period: For example, cash transactions of Rs 2 lakhs in a month, or 5 lakhs in a year.
The facility has been added to your efiling account so that you can alert the authorities if you find that there are lots of cash transactions happening in an account registered in your name.
For most users who do not do not deposit much cash in their accounts, no account will be listed under the section.
You can access the section by clicking here, logging in with your PAN number and then going to “Compliance” menu and then clicking on ‘Accounts with cash transactions”.
Separately, the IT department has also started processing data from gold merchants about high value purchases of gold made in the last two days using cash.
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