Hailing the new faceless e-assessment as “a game changer in the arena of direct taxes”, Confederation of Indian Industries (CII)-Goa Chairman Blaise Costabir said the new system would ensure uniformity of approach and uniform application of law-making and would put an end to the possible harassment of honest tax-payers.
Joint Commissioner, Income Tax in Bengaluru, Dr Vinod Sharma defined the new faceless e-assessment as a scheme where assessment would be done without the taxpayer knowing who is doing the assessing officer and there would be no human interface.
Both of them were speaking in a webinar on “Faceless E-Assessment: Honouring the Honest” organized by Regional Outreach Bureau (Maharashtra and Goa Region) and Press Information Bureau (Western Region) under the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, on Tuesday.
Speaking in the webinar, Costabir said the faceless e-assessment system would bring about a paradigm shift by eliminating human interface in income tax assessment.
“In a sense, it is a randomised and automated system based on the concept of dynamic jurisdiction. It eliminates the undesirable practices that emerge when there is a scope for individual discretion and subjective judgement.”
“The anonymous nature of the process will discourage high-pitched assessments and will lead to objective, fair and just assessment orders which can be finalized quicker,” said Costabir.
He added that technology intervention in the faceless e-assessment system will also help to build trust within industry and wealth-creators.
“Now there will be no manual scrutiny, it will be only computer aided. There will be a focus on knowing the law, on skill, rather than knowing the officer or the networking ability of a particular tax consultant”, stated the CII-Goa chairman.
Explaining details about the broad features of the faceless e-assessment system, Dr Sharma said since its launch on a pilot basis in October 2019, when around 58,000 cases and 25 Principal Commissioner-IT posts were notified under this scheme, around 15-16% cases have been completed without any hassles till now, despite the pandemic.
“This is the beauty of the scheme. Even if there is any hurdle, work can still be done and obtain results", he stated.
He said the scheme brings about three big reforms for the Income Tax Department, faceless assessment, faceless appeal and taxpayers' charter.
“This new scheme was launched to decrease the burden and bring transparency, efficiency and accountability in the system,” he said.
Costabair flagged some concerns with the new scheme, stating that training and awareness is required as this is a new scheme and whether there is going to be an issue of state based Court or Tribunal cases.
In addition to this, multiple languages in the country may make it difficult, as a tax filer may file in one language which has to be understood for an assessment in some other part of the country, he said.
In reply to these issues, the joint commissioner said the department would look into these issues.
In his welcome address, Deputy Director of PIB Goa D V Vinod Kumar, said the scheme is expected to rule out personal interactions and undesirable practices. The webinar was moderated by Dhanalakshmi P, Information Assistant in PIB Mumbai.
