Income Tax Dept Refunds Rs 127000 Cr Through Digital Refund System: Finance Secretary

The Income Tax Department has issued tax refunds of about Rs 1,27,000 crore that have been sent to the bank accounts of individuals and businesses so far in this financial year, Finance Secretary Ajay Bhushan Pandey said.

Giving details of tax refunds under the new automated system, Pandey said that the process has ensured that businesses seamlessly get liquidity in this difficult time of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With the Income-tax Department having a fully automated system of refunds now, payments are directly going into the bank accounts of the taxpayers without any manual interface or intervention.

"This is a quick refunds payment system which is fully automated and completely transparent. The Income Tax Department has created a DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) like architecture to execute quick refunds transfer directly into the bank account of the assessee in a seamless manner and at a larger scale," the Finance Secretary said.

"We are monitoring the progress of the quick refunds system weekly and release refunds data in public domain. This helps us build trust between the taxpayers and the I-T department besides facilitating liquidity to the taxpayers," he added.

This financial year from April 1 to October 27 the I-T Department has been able to issue refunds to the tune of Rs 1,26,909 crore to more than 39.14 lakh taxpayers. Out of this Rs 34,532 crore were issued as refunds to individual taxpayers in about 37.22 lakh cases while Rs 92,376 crore were issued as refunds to 1,92,409 in corporate tax cases.