black money

Air passengers carrying large amounts of money can be detained by authorities for questioning. Such detention cannot be dubbed as violation of a citizen's personal liberty, the Supreme Court has ruled.The court has held that such frisking and detaining of passengers by the authorities is in national interest. Otherwise, terrorists and vested interests would carry out their activities unchecked, it said. Full Article

The income tax (IT ) department in a raid on a chartered accountant (CA) last week unearthed a money laundering racket running into over Rs 1,000 crore. The CA, Mukesh Choksi, through his several companies generated fake bills showing share transactions in the name of his customers who wanted to convert their black money into white. The department also recovered a pay order of 1 million and came across another onetime transfer of Rs 10 crore in a private bank account. Full Article

Earlier, the entities that fell under the ambit of the law included only chit fund companies, banking companies, financial institutions and housing finance companies. The amendment now says any company registered under section 25 of the Indian Companies Act, 1956, and/or as a trust or society under the Societies Act, 1860, or any similar state legislation, will be brought under the purview of PMLA. Full Article

Searches conducted by the Income Department are important means for unearthing black money. However, under the scheme before insertion of special procedure for assessment of search cases, valuable time is lost in trying to relate the undisclosed incomes to the different years. Tax evaders generally manage to divert the focus to procedural and legal issues and often invent new evidence to explain undisclosed income. By the time search r Full Article

Swiss banks may have handed over client details to the US, but they have said India is not welcome there on a name-fishing expedition. “Swiss law and even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) model tax convention do not permit fishing expeditions, in other words, the indiscriminate trawling through bank accounts in the [...] Full Article

The cash reward scheme for officers of the Investigating Wing of the Income Tax Department is bad in law and ultra vires the Constitution, the Kolkata Bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal has held. Full Article

Government has no plans to bring a new amnesty scheme for tax evaders and wants to amend the Indo-Mauritius tax treaty to curb its abuse by companies, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Tuesday. VDS schemes in the past offered amnesty to people declaring black money and paying tax. But VDS schemes cannot be hugely successful [...] Full Article

The government has made the first move to home in on individuals and entities who have stashed away black money in one of the offshore banks. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has sent notices to at least 50 individuals figuring among a list of Indians who hold accounts with the LGT Bank, Leichtenstein, a tax haven [...] Full Article