Income-Tax department to establish a centralised processing centre (CPC) at
Bangalore for processing all electronically filed returns in the country and
paper returns filed in Karnataka.
The CPC would enable the department to process the returns and issue refunds
expeditiously, the Union Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, told reporters
after the Cabinet meeting.
It would encourage more taxpayers to resort to electronic filing of returns.
The creation of the new centre entails an estimated expenditure of Rs 255.46
crore over a period of five years, he said.
The Minister also said that the process of selection of the vendor was in
its final stages and the income-tax department expects to operationalise the
CPC within the next four months.
The data relating to processing of returns would reside in the primary
data-centre of the income tax department which has recently been
commissioned at New Delhi. The income tax department would continue to
exercise full control over taxpayers' data so as to maintain privacy and
security of the data.
Redeployment of resources
The establishment of the CPC will enable the department to release
high-skilled resources, currently deployed for processing of returns, for
redeployment to pursue large-scale cross-verification of actionable
information.
The workflow in the CPC will be managed by departmental officers and staff
who will be assisted by vendor supplied manpower. The department officers
and staff will be responsible for logistics, coordination, supervising
operations and sovereign responsibilities.
They will also be responsible for resolution of mismatches in the
information contained in the tax return and the departmental database and
redressal of public grievances.
The vendor will be responsible for developing software for processing of
income tax returns and tax accounting. He will also be responsible for
collection of returns from income tax offices, scanning data entry and
storage of I-T returns.