Budget 2019: Tax scrutiny goes digital; refund in a day

The future of tax assessment is anonymous. The taxpayer will not know the tax officer and vice versa, finance minister Piyush Goyal said on Friday, saying the government was moving towards a transparent, computerised system. I-T returns will be processed in 24 hours and refunds issued simultaneously.

Currently, e-assessment is already deployed, including in scrutiny assessments, to cut down the interface between the taxpayer and income tax officials. However, there is a point of contact. On many occasions, I-T officials ask for physical documents, even if submitted online, and face-toface meetings do happen.

“Within the next two years, almost all verification and assessment of returns selected for scrutiny will be done electronically through an anonymised back office, manned by tax experts and officials, without any personal interface between taxpayers and tax officers,” finance minister Piyush Goyal said in his interim Budget speech.


Tax professionals say this will ensure no personal point of contact, but the IT platforms need to be robust to deal with the e-assessment procedure. The other challenge, they say, is that an I-T official in a smaller city may not have been exposed to the intricacies of, say, cross-border transactions.