The Income Tax (I-T) department has begun the process of reopening old assessments, albeit with a difference this year. The new rule, which came into effect from 2021-22, is simple: till the machine throws up a name, the taxman’s hands are tied – unlike before when he could slap notice to reopen a past tax assessment as long as there was some information that a slice of income in a certain year had escaped tax.The unsettling letters from the tax office have started arriving. The Income Tax (I-T) department has begun the process of reopening old assessments, albeit with a difference this year. Tax officials across the country are busy tracking ‘INSIGHT’, the portal that spews out the names of tax dodgers following an algorithmic scanning of a mountain of data that has been fed in.
