Got a loan from bank? Not paying back may land you in this fresh trouble!

Bad news for loan defaulters! If you have taken a loan from a bank and not returned the money, you may not be able to escape the wrath of the government. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has now directed the Income-Tax Department to share in details of assets and accounts of loan defaulters against whom a public sector bank has made a plea to it. The means, banks would now get access to information about loan defaulters' assets which they can use to recover the money.

The CBDT's move is another crackdown on the loan defaulters to recover the public money from them. A latest CBDT order says the income tax department will cull out this information from the Income Tax Return (ITR) of an assessee.

The order was issued to all field departments of the income tax department on Wednesday. CBDT said that the order was issued in "public interest" after several requests were received by it from public sector banks that sought information of immovable assets of a loan defaulter to effect recovery from them.

The CBDT order said it is of the view that sharing of information of assets held by loan defaulters with the public sector banks is in public interest. Hence, such information can be shared by the tax department with the banks. 

As per the order, the information that the banks can get from the tax department includes the statement of assets and bank account details of the loan defaulters. This will help in faster recovery of loan by the PSB from the loan defaulter.

In the last few years, a number of large bank loan frauds have been reported. The biggest of them include cases like the Rs 13,000 crore Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi Punjab National Bank fraud, the Sterling Biotech case, Vijay Mallya case etc.