Think before posting expensive car, jewellery pic on Instagram, Facebook. Tax officials could be watching

Posting pictures of your new car or a recently bought farm house on Instagram or Facebook may soon lead Income Tax sleuths to your door.

According to a report in Bloomberg, government's 'Project Insight', which was built over a period of seven years at a cost of about $156 million may soon be able to catch tax evaders in India by keeping a tab on their social media posts.

The financial information vital in nabbing tax evaders will not just be taken from bank accounts, credit card spends, property, stock investments, cash purchases and deposits but also from social media sites, the report said.

The use of social media monitoring to check spending patterns is already being used in countries like Belgium, Canada and Australia. A similar program called 'Connect' in UK has prevented the loss of $5.4 billion in revenue, the London-based Institute of Financial Accountants said in a December 2016 report.

L&T Infotech has agreed to the build-own-operate-transfer model, which means that while it will be running the project and earning revenues during the contract period, it will ultimately transfer the network to the government once the contract runs out, the report said.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had earlier said the number of persons under tax net has increased by 91 lakh after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's demonetisation move and warned tax non-compliant persons to refrain from dealing in excessive cash and evaded money.

While launching a website on 'Operation Clean Money', he said the fallout of the November 8 decision to demonetise higher denomination currency has increased digitisation of economy, brought more people under tax net and instilled "huge fear of dealing in cash".

Stating that an additional 91 lakh people have filed the I-T returns post demonetisation, Jaitley said he expects further increase in tax returns going ahead.

Finance Minister said with technology as a great enabler, detection of money trail has become easy and also it has become easy to see if there is an element of disproportionality in any transaction.