Taxman recovers Rs 35,500 crore outstanding from April to September

This includes ₹23,000 crore of corporate tax and ₹12,500 crore of personal income tax.

Officials said the figure is going to rise further as the board has asked field formations to focus on recovery and set zone-wise recovery targets.

“The focus is on data-based recovery and we aim to recover over ₹90,000 crore to ₹1 lakh crore from the outstanding demands,” a senior official told ET.

The income tax department had made a total recovery of ₹73,500 crore of outstanding demand in the last fiscal year. Of this, ₹56,000 crore was corporate tax and ₹16,500 crore personal income tax.

As on August 1, there was an outstanding tax demand of ₹26.13 lakh crore, of which over Rs 9 lakh crore was in the ‘difficult to recover’ category. The Mumbai zone has the maximum outstanding amount, followed by Delhi and Gujarat zones. They also have maximum recovery targets.Officials said that based on data available with the department, the top 5,000 cases of ‘arrear demand’ cover almost 60% of the total demand and the department is focussing on these cases. The field formations were asked to work on cases which are not under the ‘difficult to recover’ category with a more focused and targeted approach to manage tax demands.Every zone was asked to create a special team comprising the principal commissioner of income tax to provide analytics of cases falling under the ‘top 5,000’ identified by the CBDT.

“Data analytics is helping in being more specific with the recovery process and officers are using this to categorise demands which are over 10-year-old and where the person is either dead or missing,” the official cited earlier said, adding that officials have also been asked to give a list of cases for write-offs.