“The tender process for auditing social sector schemes has led to deterioration in the quality of audit. Audit firms quote too low a price for procuring the auditing work of such schemes. However, low prices certainly are a cause of concern for us keeping in mind that the actual cost of such audits is higher,” Chopra said while expressing concern over the social sector audit in the country. He said that the institute would probe the reasons why audit firms quote such low prices in the tenders.
The Centre may drop the idea of granting states equal powers to levy indirect taxes as part of roll-out of a single tax rate regime. The Finance Ministry had in April sought the Law Ministry’s opinion on granting states such a power, but the idea seems to have been shot down.
The Income Tax Department is likely to slap a demand of Rs 8,500 crore on foreign companies and their domestic subsidiaries which allegedly transferred profits to other countries to reduce tax liability. “Income Tax Department is likely to raise over Rs 8,500 crore from transfer pricing audits. There has been scrutiny of 8,105 such cases,” Finance Ministry sources told PTI.
The government is mulling a comprehensive code of conduct for financial analysts and investment bankers to make them more accountable to the companies and retail investors they serve. A proposal in this regard from a high-powered committee of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) that investigated the financial scandal at the erstwhile Satyam Computer Services is under the consideration of the ministry of corporate affairs.
The Centre has formulated a National Litigation Policy to reduce the cases pending in various courts in India under the National Legal Mission to reduce average pendency time from 15 years to 3 years. This was announced by Dr.M.Veerappa Moily, Minister of Law and Justice while announcing the National Litigation Policy here today. Following is the full text of the National Litigation Policy.
Asked if the annual exercise of the CAG was futile considering the little action taken on the anomalies pointed out by it, Rai said, “The Constitutional mandate of the CAG is to prepare the report and hand it over to the legislature. If the matter concerns any public undertaking, it is referred to the Committee on Public Undertaking and if it concerns any department, it is referred to the Public Accounts Committee.”
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday said the government will take a view on new tax slabs after receiving inputs from different stakeholders on the revised draft of the Direct Taxes Code (DTC).
New facility added in My Account allows registered E-filers to View the Tax Credit Statement (Form 26AS) to verify if the tax payments made by you or TDS deducted from salary or interest etc are correctly reported to the Department. This is crucial to ensure that you receive complete and accurate tax credit for tax payments and TDS reported by you in the I-T return. Please immediately contact the bank or deductor in case of any discrepancy or missing entries.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has unearthed cases of financial statements and audit reports of certain companies with forged signatures of auditors, sparking off fear of a larger menace that may have hit the country’s auditing fraternity.
Admitting that many Income Tax refunds were still pending, the I-T Department decided to “clean up the mismatched TDS database” due to which the refunds were held up. An I-T Department release said, “The Income Tax Department has taken the initiative to clean up the mismatched TDS data base. Many refunds are pending with the IT Department due to the mismatch of tax paid by the assessee, but the same is not being reflected in the computer software of the department.”
