Income tax dept sets up compliance management cell to track evaders

Under its business intelligence project, the government also plans to develop an integrated platform for effective utilization of available and accessible information to promote voluntary compliance and deter non-compliance. Photo: Mint



Live Mint :Remya Nair  :: Tue, May 21 2013. 12 45 PM IST

Dept is also sending 70,000 letters to individuals who have been tracked through its business intelligence project

New Delhi: Stepping up its efforts to track tax evaders, the income-tax (I-T) department has set up a compliance management cell that will specifically track their tax payments and return filings. The tax department is also sending an additional 70,000 letters to individuals who have been tracked through its business intelligence project.

Under the business intelligence project, the department monitors high-value transactions bank deposits, bonds purchases and credit card bills above Rs.2 lakh—all linked through the permanent account number—and checks whether these individuals have filed income-tax returns. The department had sent out more than 100,000 letters in the last few months to check if the individual had filed a tax return or not.

“Preliminary assessment of the results show that a large number of taxpayers have filed return of income and paid self-assessment tax after initiation of this exercise. Taxes of more than Rs.600 crore has been paid as self-assessment tax and advance tax by the target segment in last three months,” the government said in a statement. The compliance management cell will help the government to take effective follow-up action.

Under its business intelligence project, the government also plans to develop an integrated platform for effective utilization of available and accessible information to promote voluntary compliance and deter non-compliance. The platform will integrate enterprise data warehouse, data mining, web mining, and other such tools for effective outcomes.

Why this secrecy over Sonia Gandhi?

What makes Sonia Gandhi go unscathed from all the mainstream media torrent? PTI.

First Post :May 16, 2013

“Why is it that the mainstream media (MSM) displays, what can only be termed as pusillanimity bordering on the obsequious when it comes to Sonia Gandhi?” is the question that bounces around inside my head quite often. Occasionally it lights up my amygdala.

There is a certain docile, rebarbative and delightfully ludicrous air about the MSM each timeSonia Gandhi (or one of her family members) is in the middle of a controversy. I will not get into the impressive range of controversies that have cropped up over the years, but suffice to say that each time things came to such a pass, either the clouds blew over in wondrous haste or they rained elsewhere.

A dripping wet poodle Prime Minister is what you occasionally get, as evidenced by the recent developments surrounding Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal.

After years of peddling the Our-PM-is-the-most-honest-of-them-all-in-the-entire-galaxy balderdash the MSM seems to be finally catching up with the meaning of words like integrity & accountability, as they get busy aiding and abetting – quite reflexively – some dark, unknown and easy-to-guess forces to bury the non-performing nightwatchman Prime Minister six feet under.

But the Queen continues to escapes their collective gaze. Blame Proxy-o-cracy!!

To give credit where it is due though, over the last few days, there has been a sprinkling of articles that at least attempt to ask – meekly so – a few pertinent questions along the lines of if-Sonia-is-the-fount-of-executive-power-then-should-the-buck-not-stop-with-her-on-India-becoming-a-Scamrashtra. Laying the axe to the root, if you will.

The most scathing commentary yet…
“Should Sonia Gandhi, ruler of the Congress party, be congratulated for finishing 15 years in Indian politics? It is not a sign of expertise if an heir becomes king. So why should it be different with her?” asked Surjit Bhalla in an The Indian Express piece titled ‘Evaluating Sonia, the black box leader’ (March 23rd, 2013) before he drove the screw deeper: “Every political leader has been pilloried in India, and in most democracies. Pilloried for being stupid, unfit to rule and worse; yet, such questions are not raised with regard to Sonia. Our free press can make mincemeat of even decent politicians (Manmohan Singh has been variously described as spineless, a night-watchman following orders, Mumble Singh and worse) and yet the press has never even demanded that the chairperson of the Congress for 15 years hold a press conference in a language of her choosing — English, Hindi or Italian”.

Ouch! In his follow-up piece a week later ‘Message to Sonia: Reform of Perish’, he concluded his incisive commentary thus:

“Recall that Annie Besant became president of the Congress party in 1917. If Sonia Gandhi does not change, then she risks the following obituary of the party she heads: It took a white, European, socialist, woman to help create the Congress party — and it has taken a white, European, socialist, woman to destroy it more than a hundred years later.”

Ouch ouch ouch!

I acknowledge that the 7 aspects that I will now touch upon briefly – three in this Part, and four in Part 2 – are by no means either completely unknown, or constitute all that needs to be debated, discussed and perhaps put under the journalistic scanner. The purpose of this 2-part series is to act as a gentle reminder to the Indian MSM (especially TV) that the citizens are not fooled by their attempts at silence on issues surrounding Sonia Gandhi & family. Or as M.J.Akbar noted:

“That purr in the ear isn’t the music of your back being scratched, darling; it’s the crackle of your slim wallet being emptied of ethics”.

The poor little powerful Queen

Is it really true that Sonia Gandhi’s financial assets are a mere 1.37 Cr [2009 affidavit]? Let me strive for a little more exactitude, so that I am not accused of crude approximations. Take a look at the table below (source – myneta.info):

One set of rules for the slaves, another for the suzeraintyI leave you and your powers of incredulity – which I am certain are immense – to decide if this matter warrants further enquiry. You can access the affidavit details by clicking here. While we are on affidavits, it may well be worth your while spending a minute or two examining the affidavits of Rahul Gandhi, with special focus on the educational qualifications. The matter was discussed in greater detail by me a few months ago in a piece titled ‘Rahul Gandhi: PM-in- waiting despite all this?’

In August 2011, India Today ran a small report titled ‘What Gandhis don’t tell the Lok Sabha‘, and I quote:

It’s common courtesy for MPs to inform the secretariat about trips abroad, even if they are of a personal nature. But since June 2004, the month UPA came to power, the Congress president and her son have not bothered to inform the secretariat about any of their foreign trips.

Subsequently, two applications were filed under RTI seeking details on foreign travels of MPs and foreign travels of Sonia Gandhi – what followed was a merry-go-round involving the Lok Sabha Secretariat, Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Central Information Commission (CIC), Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and National Advisory Council’s (NAC) Central Public Information Officer.

“It is disturbing that institutions that run the government have no knowledge of the authority that can furnish details of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign travel,” noted an exasperated RTI activist. (You can read the full report here)

The curious case of Dr. Subramanian Swamy’s blog

Most of you would be familiar with the content of Dr. Swamy’s blog; those of you who have not made your acquaintance with it yet, please fire up your search engines. Whilst it is nobody’s case that every word in there is the gospel truth – and some of Dr. Swamy’s utterances on other issues may be a tad jarring to some of us – the following 2 points merit some thought:

1) If the matter presented in his blog-post(s) is untrue and borders on libel, why have the concerned parties not sued him?

2) On the other hand, if the matter holds some truth in its folds, why has the MSM never gone to town with it? Why the silence? Or is it a case of the unutterable refusing to chase the uneatable, with apologies to Oscar Wilde?
What gives?

… To be continued. Part 2 will be published here tomorrow.

shining.path.notperu@gmail.com

Why is TCS fussing over China?

If the US tightens its immigration laws, making it tougher and more expensive for Indian IT companies to get H1-B visas for their employees, spreading its risks by growing its business in China will only make more sense for TCS. Photo: Mint

 Live Mint :Leslie D’MonteTue, May 21 2013. 10 08 AM IST

When Li Keqiang visits Mumbai, he’ll first go to TCS Goregaon office; what’s so important about this visit?

With just a little over Rs.350 crore in revenue from its China operations as on 31 March 2012, one can be excused for wondering what India’s largest software services provider, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), has been doing in that country for the last decade. Especially since TCS had slightly over 276,000 employees worldwide and $11.6 billion in revenue as on 31 March.

The question becomes all the more pertinent when Chinese PremierLi Keqiang visits Mumbai on Tuesday. While Li will address the industry at a Confederation of Indian Industry-hosted conference in the evening, he will first visit TCS’s offshore development centre in Goregaon, a Western suburb, around 3.40pm. He will be accompanied by Tata group chairman Cyrus Mistry and TCS MD and CEO N. Chandrasekaran, even as the company is tight-lipped about other details. The event is not open to the media, except for some photo shoots.

So what’s so important about Li’s visit to TCS?

For one, TCS pioneered the entry of the over $108 billion Indian IT industry in China in 2002. Currently, it has six global delivery centers in China—Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Shenzhen and Dalian. It can provide services in nine languages including English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese. In 2005, TCS was invited by the Chinese government “to form a joint venture to create a large offshoring base in China”. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) supports the joint venture.

Incidentally, Vish Iyer heads the Asia-Pacific, or Apac region, since 2010. Based in Singapore, he manages the 12,000-odd employees in 12 countries including Australia, Japan, South Korea and China. More than 40% of onsite employees are locals, the company says on its website.

However, Qiqi Dong is the CEO of TCS China, which makes sense since 97% of the employees are locals. Besides TCS China is a wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE). WFOEs do not need a mainland Chinese investor, and are limited-liability corporations that can give greater control over the business venture.

In an April interview to the holding company Tata Sons Ltd’s website, www.tata.com, Dong said TCS China sees a lot of opportunity in technologies such as cloud, mobility and big data. “Currently, a key TCS project in China is iCity, a host of cloud-based IT solutions that aims to enable integrated urban management, improved quality of life and inclusive economic, social and sustainable growth,” he said.

TCS, said Dong in the interview, has built significant inroads in China and foresees growth in the banking and financial services areas, where banks will be looking to technology systems to help them stay nimble and lean in times of economic uncertainty. Outlining his other plans, Dong said TCS China has completed the healthcare portal for citizens in Panyu, which offers online health counselling and other health services. TCS has also partnered with Singapore Management University (SMU) to harness the strength of SMU’s and Singapore’s urban IT solutions for citizens and to take it global.

TCS, Dong added, will invest $6 million over three years to create an IT roadmap for iCities, build a comprehensive IT platform on a cloud-based infrastructure to provide intelligent solutions in all aspects of iCities including healthcare, education, safety and sustainability, B2B services for SMEs, intelligent transportation and smart grids/utilities.

Speaking about the challenges in China, Dong said the sales cycle process is generally longer than in other countries. Strong relationships must be built in order to sell to companies or authorities in China. He added that in spite of having world-class engineering talent, there is relative scarcity of domain knowledge in China. “Scarcity of middle management and project management talent and low English language capabilities are some of the challenges multinationals face.”

Research firm IDC forecast that 2013 IT spending in emerging markets—including the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) regions—will grow by 8.8% to exceed $730 billion, while BRIC, especially China, will continue to dominate. China, it added, will continue to account for over one- quarter of emerging markets IT spending, even as it predicted a 4-point dip in growth rate to “only” 10% in 2013.

On 14 May, IDC lowered its global IT-spending forecast to grow 4.9% to $2.06 trillion in 2013, down from its previous forecast for an increase of 5.5%. Among other things, it added that slower growth in China contributed to volatile spending patterns and vendors reporting difficulty closing deals at the end of the first quarter. Despite the lowering of forecast, China remains a very important global market for IT spends.

Going forward, TCS, according to its website, aims at making China the “delivery epicenter for its neighbouring markets comprising Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Hong Kong”. TCS China’s current 40-odd clients include the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS), Bank of China, the Hua Xia Bank and the Guangdong Provincial Rural Credit Cooperative Union. The Skandia involved TCS BaNCS insurance implementation. TCS hopes to take this further with the Chinese premier’s support.

Further, TCS China may have only around 3,000 employees as of date. But if the US tightens its immigration laws, making it tougher and more expensive for Indian IT companies to get H1-B visas for their employees, spreading its risks by growing its business in China will only make more sense for TCS

Why think tanks struggle in India

The South and North Block of Rashtrapati Bhavan are seen in this file photo. Representational Image. AFP

By Nihit Goyal & Shweta Srinivasan/IANS:First Post: 14 mts ago

Strong policy research is the cornerstone of policy formulation and a necessary condition for sustained good governance. However, it is widely acknowledged that the quality of policy research in India has been found wanting, both within and outside the government. Indicatively, not a single Indian think tank featured in the top 50 in 2012 Global Go To Think Tanks Rankings, and only six of them made it to the top 150.

There are several challenges that Indian think tanks face — insufficient funding, dearth of skilled staff, and limited support from the government. Numerous factors contribute to the high cost of policy research. First, for rigorous policy research, access to quality data is the most essential. Government departments are often reluctant to share data they collect. Though the Right to Information Act seeks to address this gap to some extent, it is still a reactive and time-consuming mechanism for obtaining data.

Even when information is shared, methodological inconsistencies in data gathering make comparison and aggregation challenging, if not untenable. In the absence of accessible data, substantial resources may be required for primary data collection. Second, as the size and complexity of data increase, think tanks need to become adept at using appropriate tools for data analysis.

The South and North Block of Rashtrapati Bhavan are seen in this file photo. Representational Image. AFP

But few think tanks can afford a heavy investment in computing infrastructure. In addition, licences and training for proprietary software can also be prohibitively expensive. For example, a single user licence for the TIMES suite, a popular energy modelling software, costs over Rs 10 lakh ($18,000). Free and open source software, though more economical, usually comes with inadequate support and training and is difficult to master in limited time. Third, to stay up to date, think tanks need access to latest research.

However, low price editions of books are rare and imported editions are expensive; subscription prices of international journals have risen steadily. Further, research infrastructure becomes economical with scale, which most Indian think tanks do not possess yet. In fact, even a well-endowed and large institution like Harvard University has described journal subscriptions as “fiscally unsustainable”. While think tanks may not be unique in facing these costs, their non-profit nature and unsteady cash flow makes long-term planning to address these challenges difficult.

Can the government step in to improve the situation? The government recently announced the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). Fundamentally, guidelines for data collection need to be put in place to ensure systemic and semantic consistency. Further, all data shared under this initiative, for example through Data Portal India, should be made open to facilitate access. The NDSAP also leaves the pricing of data at the discretion of relevant government agencies. Instead, to alleviate the cost burden for think tanks, the price of data should reflect only the additional cost incurred in collation and disbursement.

As the National e-Governance Plan aims to automate administrative processes, the additional cost of providing data is unlikely to be significant. The Indian government also launched the National Knowledge Network (NKN) in 2011 for data and resource sharing amongst education and research institutions. The NKN provides services such as collaborative research, grid computing, sharing of computing resources, and a virtual library. It has already connected 950 institutions and 14,000 colleges covering agriculture, education, governance, healthcare, and science and technology research. Such domain knowledge and resources are high in demand within the think tank community.

However, it is not clear whether, how, and when, think tanks can join the NKN. Can they cash in too? The inclusion of think tanks into this network will not only reduce their computing and library costs but also enhance research synergies – think tanks will benefit from better access to specialists in various fields, who can in turn profit from a deeper understanding of the policy implications of their work. As the ground work for the NKN has already been laid, the cost of extending it is unlikely to be significant.

Even if think tanks are charged on cost-basis for the services they avail, it could be a win-win – they would benefit from increased resource sharing and the network would profit from increased scale. The Indian think tank community is not new but, unlike its US counterpart, has not received much institutional or policy support to enhance the rigour of its work.

By enabling think tanks to worry less about the cost and effort needed for quality work, government measures to inculcate better data practices and plug think tanks into the wider network of research institutions can help in tipping the balance. Further, they would also promote transparency and healthy competition in policy research. This could lead to the presence of more Indian think tanks in global rankings and, more importantly, contribute to improving the quality of governance in the country.

IANS