I-T Department unearths income of Rs 5,400 crore post-note ban

The Income Tax (I-T) Department has unearthed undisclosed income of more than Rs 5,400 crore in over a thousand search operations carried out since the November 8 demonetisation of high-value currency, Parliament was informed on Friday.

"During the period from November 9, 2016 to January 10, 2017, more than 1,100 searches and surveys were conducted by the I-T Department apart from issuing more than 5,100 verification notices in the cases of suspicious high value cash deposits or related activities," Minister of State for Finance Arjun Ram Meghwal told the Lok Sabha in a written reply.

"These actions led to seizure of valuables of more than Rs 610 crore, which includes cash of Rs 513 crore. Seizure of cash in new currency notes was about Rs 110 crore. The undisclosed income detected in these actions was more than Rs 5,400 crore," he said.

"The data available from the National Crime Records Bureau indicates that 1,57,818 numbers of fake Indian currency notes having a face-value of Rs 11,24,04,980 have been reported by states/UTs police for the period 9.11.2016 to 14.7.2017," he added. 

Last week, the Income Tax Department came out with the second list of 5.56 lakh account holders under its `Operation Clean Money`, who will be asked to explain the high cash deposits, found inconsistent with their tax profiles, made during the note ban.

This is the second list from the Income Tax department. The earlier list had identified 17.92 lakh people, who were asked to explain the sources of large cash deposited by them.

These lists are a part of the department`s `Operation Clean Money`, in which data analytics has been made use of to analyse the data received between November 9 and December 30, 2016.

From the earlier list, the department has identified a total of 1.04 lakh persons, who did not disclose all bank accounts during e-verification.

Out of the 17.92 lakh people identified earlier for e-verification of large cash deposits, 9.72 lakh had submitted the online response.