Commercial taxes department revamp gets nod from Tamil Nadu govt

CHENNAI: The state government has given its approval to restructure commercial taxes department by upgrading 1,000 posts of assistants to deputy commercial tax officers (840) and commercial tax officers (160). The move is aimed at increasing government revenue, balancing hierarchical pattern and providing required number of commercial tax officers to roving squads, audit and intelligence wings.

This would result in additional expenditure of Rs 29.92 crore for the salary of the upgraded posts. The approval comes after Finance minister Palanivel Thiagarajan announced in the revised budget speech in 2021-22 that the commercial taxes department will be restructured to place more human resources at the cutting edge level and to strengthen the intelligence and audit wings.

Deputy commercial tax officers constitute the lowest level of officers authorised as proper officers under Tamil Nadu Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 and perform statutory role under the act, assistants, on the other hand, cannot do so. As a result, upgrading the posts of assistants to deputy commercial tax officers would increase the stock of proper officers required for monitoring, filing of returns, issuing refunds, scrutiny, audit and inspections.

Similarly, roving squads are operated with the help of officers derived from the territorial wing on rotational basis due to shortage of manpower. Since the GST Act is a new law and use of modern technology to make them accountable as well as to increase their efficiency in identifying high risk vehicle movements with a view to curb tax evasion, expertise of higher officials in the rank of commercial tax officers is required to detect the cases in roving squads.

As such, the plans aim at increasing the roving squads to 100 which results in increasing the posts of commercial tax officers. Similarly, to strengthen the intelligence wing, it is proposed to increase the number of mobile squads to keep a check on goods without tax invoices and curtailing the under-reporting of transactions.