Corporate advance tax up 15% in Sept quarter

MUMBAI: Buoyed by earnings growth in banks, financial services and manufacturing firms, Corporate India has paid 15% higher advance tax in the June-September quarter over the year-ago period.

Among the top companies whose advance tax payment for the three months have shown a marked rise are Reliance Industries Ltd ( RIL) , Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Tata Steel, TCS, HUL, SBI and Siemens.

The trend seen in September collection tends to continue for the rest of the financial year, unless the December collection takes a surprise fall as it happened in 2008-09 when the collection fell sharply in December after a 70 % increase in the first quarter.

“Our expectations were more...some companies in sectors like cement are not showing good numbers,” chief commissioner of Income Tax Mumbai, PP Srivastava, said.

“While sectors like engineering are lagging and collection from pharma, oil and petroleum and FMCG firms did not live up to expectations, there’s growth in sectors like banking, insurance, power, media, and manufacturing and other financial services,” said another tax official.

The country’s largest private sector firm, Reliance Industries (RIL), which was a zero tax paying company till five years ago, now figures among the top 10 tax payers. It’s outgo for the quarter under review showed a 12.8% year-on-year growth to Rs 1,306 crore. LIC, the largest insurance company, paid Rs 1,067 crore against Rs 939 crore, an increase of 13.68 % while the second largest lender ICICI Bank’s tax outgo rose 19.9% to Rs 601 cr. India’s biggest software firm TCS paid Rs 280 crore against Rs 260 crore, a rise of 7.69%.

However, the advance tax number for Tata Motors, the country’s biggest auto maker by sales, dipped to Rs 85 cr from Rs 130 crore.

Other top tax paying companies include HDFC Bank (Rs 600 cr vs 425cr), Tata Steel (Rs 500 cr vs 400 cr), Union Bank (Rs 308 cr vs Rs 207 cr), IDBI Bank (Rs 182 cr vs Rs 62 cr), Glenmark Generic (Rs 16 cr vs Rs 12 cr), HUL (Rs 140 cr vs Rs 175 cr) and Grasim Industries (Rs 80 cr vs Rs 200 cr).

The numbers for some of the other leading companies are : Glaxo Smithkline (Rs 81cr vs Rs 78cr), Hindalco (Rs 140 cr vs Rs 70cr), Crompton & Greaves (Rs 67 cr vs Rs 58cr), M&M Finance (Rs 65 cr vs Rs 40cr), HDFC Ltd (Rs 400 cr vs Rs 215 cr), HPCL (Rs 112 cr vs Rs 61 cr) and Rallis (Rs 15 cr).