Aiming to reform and broaden the tax net
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new five point charter for tax administrators can rightly be called an innovative step in bringing reform to the country’s age old and redundant revenue administration, which still has a huge hangover of the British colonial legacy. This charter is uniquely embodied in the word ‘RAPID’ which refers to revenue, accountability, probity, information and digitisation. The message conveyed through this new charter is loud and simple: Make the tax system easier and accessible for the tax payers; at the same time, the defaulters must find it difficult to bend the system.
Heralding dynamism to the complex revenue administration through this kind of ‘people-friendly mechanism’ can be a great boon for the country as a whole when Modi is trying to bring home ‘less Government, more governance’. The need of the hour is to introduce economic reforms, one being prominently in the revenue sector, both for enhancing respect for the law of the land amongst common citizens and indirectly inching towards lessening the burden of so-called ‘tax payment’ deeply ingrained in our ossified edifice of the tax administration.
Addressing a two-day brain storming conference Rajaswa Gyan Sangam, on Thursday, Modi had urged tax administrators to transform into a ‘Karma Sangam’. He asked the senior officials to widen the tax payers from the existing 5.4 crore to 10 crore households. For infusing new blood into the old system, his appeal for changing attitude of the officials towards tax payers is laudable. Today, nearly 42,000 taxmen raise barely eight per cent of the tax. In this age of globalisation and an ever expanding network of information and technology, the revenue department can take one more step for spreading awareness of the benefits of paying tax to the grass root levels.
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