operation clean money, income tax department, suspicious deposits, tax harassment, tax terrorism, arun jaitley, indian tax payers, tax to gdp ratio in india, pm modi
A man walks pasts an income tax billboard in New Delhi. Representational Image]Reuters file

The Income Tax (I-T) Department has attached more than 1,500 unaccounted properties across the country within one and a half years of the introduction of the revised Benami legislation. The amount attached is whopping Rs. 43 billion. With attachments of 200 properties each, Jaipur and Mumbai top the list.

According to a Finance Ministry official, Patna has witnessed the least number of attachments at 30 followed by Lucknow at 50. Kolkata (144), Chandigarh (110), and Hyderabad (100) also featured in the list.

The investigations carried out by the IT Department have uncovered many ways used by the offenders to hide their illicit wealth. In one such case in Jabalpur, a driver was found to be the benamidar. He owned land worth Rs. 77 million. The beneficial owner is the employer of the driver, a Madhya Pradesh-based listed company. In Mumbai, a professional was found to be holding several immovable properties in the name of shell companies which exist only on paper.

Benami Property Transactions Act empowers the IT Department officials to fast-track setting up of a dedicated adjudicating authority to disburse the large volume of cases. Presently, Benami cases are being adjudicated by an authority set up under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). An order needs to be passed within one year of attachment of property, else it lapses.

Till date, the PMLA adjudicating authority has upheld the department's 100 cases. This means these properties can now be confiscated. The department has set up a search panel for putting in place a Benami adjudicating authority.

The Benami legislation came into existence in 1988. It was refined and made more stringent by the Narendra Modi government in November 2016. The department has 24 dedicated Benami prohibition units across the country under the supervision of principal directors of investigation in the I-T Department to enable speedy action and follow-up. This is especially in cases where criminality has been detected.

The Act empowers the offenders to be prosecuted with a rigorous imprisonment of anywhere between one and seven years and a penalty of up to 25 percent of the fair market value of the property.