Over 3.46 crore individual taxpayers in country: Nirmala Sitharaman

There were slightly over 3.46 crore effective taxpayers in the country during the 2012-13 financial year, Government on Friday informed Parliament.

Minister of State for Finance Nirmala Sitharaman said in a written reply to Lok Sabha that while there were 3,46,04,064 individual assessees, the figure under the companies category stood at 5,90,288 in the latest data compiled for 2012-13.

The data for 2013-14 fiscal is yet to be compiled, she said.

Sitharaman said there was a total outstanding (provisional) of Rs 3,28,519 crore under the Income Tax category and of Rs 3,21,055 crore under the corporate tax category till June 2014.

Replying to a separate question, the minister said a case of unauthorised issue of refunds of Income Tax using login ID and password of an retired officer was detected in 2012 which has since been referred to CBI for investigation.

She also said that a number of measures have been taken to prevent the occurrence of such scams.

"A new password management policy has been implemented wherein changing/resetting of password is mandatory after an interval of 30 days, the user ID of an employee will be automatically disabled on his date of superannuation and immediate investigation and stern action against officers found to be guilty" among others are some of the measures implemented to counter the problem, she said.