In a move to contain the fiscal deficit to 5.3 percent of GDP for the current fiscal, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has urged the revenue department to take extra efforts to meet the budgeted indirect tax collection target for this fiscal. The Government has set an indirect tax collection target of Rs 5.05 lakh crore for 2012-13. In April-November 2012, indirect tax collections grew by 16.8 per cent to Rs 2.92 lakh crore.
While addressing a Central Board of Excise and Customs event, Chidambaram said “this has been a difficult year for tax collections, too as the economy slowed down, imports also slowed down, manufacturing too was subdued and therefore, collections have been affected”.
Chidambaram has asked the revenue department to focus more on shifting to a technology-driven regime for tax collection instead of following a rough approach. To avoid litigation in tax collection, finance minister has told the revenue department to adopt a non-adversarial approach for tax administration.
Further, finance minister emphasized relying more on non-intrusive intelligence gathering, technology and non-adversarial tax administration to assure that revenues will be collected in a “just and fair” manner.
