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Three Income Tax department officials are under the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) radar for allegedly facilitating fictitious refunds of TDS deducted by misusing system access of senior officers. An FIR has been filed on a complaint from the Joint Commissioner of Income Tax, Muzaffarnagar.
These three officials worked under the group C category of the Income Tax and they managed to defraud the income tax department by misusing RSA tokens of assessing officers to work out and authenticate the generation of fictitious refunds of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS), officials told PTI.
CBI carried out searches at multiple locations.
CBI has named these three officials - Abhay Kant, Saurabh Singh, and Rohit Kumar -- in connection with the case along with nine beneficiaries of the refunds, officials added.
Further, as per the officials, orders under the section are passed when any rectification to any order or processing is required either on the application of the assessee or by the assessing officer on its own when some mistake is to be corrected, which is apparent in records.
The IT department alleged that these three officials misused RSA tokens for generating fictitious refunds which were payable to 11 assessees, on the system, and got refunds aggregating to ₹1.39 crore between August 1, 2020, and August 25, 2021, till the fraud was detected.
Also, these refunds were reported as AST (Assessment Information System), an old system in the IT department, and not on ITBA (Income Tax business application) which has been adopted since 2016.
Further, it alleged that from the total amount siphoned off - nearly ₹35 lakh was deposited back to the government accounts by the accused officials - as taxes against the demand of ₹22 lakh were recovered by assessing officers by way of coercive actions against the beneficiaries.
Also, the department was able to recover about ₹57.31 lakh so far - either by the staff involved in the scam or by the assessing officers by way of attachment of accounts of the assessees.
Thereby, the total amount still outstanding including interest chargeable stands at ₹94.39 lakh.
RSA tokens are unique and time-synchronous solutions that automatically change a user's password every 60 seconds.