Chidambaram Likely To Ask Banks To Improve Online Tax Data

The Finance Minister, Mr P Chidambaram, may ask public sector banks to significantly improve the data quality in online tax accounting system (OLTAS) and e-TDS returns to enable tax credits based on electronic PAN ledger accounts. Data quality issues in OLTAS and e-TDS returns form part of the agenda of the meeting that the Finance Minister will hold with Chief executives of PSBs on August 1. Agency banks are required to transmit complete and correct tax payment data online. Moreover, as deductors the TDS returns filed by banks constitute a large segment of deductees.

An analysis of OLTAS and e-TDS data from banks pertaining to financial year 2006-07 show that there is high level of mismatch in challan identification number (CIN) in OLTAS and TDS return, errors in reporting of unique identification number of the taxpayer (PAN and TAN) in the corresponding instrument (challan) through which payment is effected and poor percentage in quoting PAN of the deductees in TDS returns filed by the banks.