The income tax department this week will begin to issue notices to as many as 1 lakh individuals as well as entities for depositing huge cash post the demonetisation drive that the government announced a year back. The notices shall be issued in 2 tranches; in the first the department will send notice to 70,000 entities that deposited cash over Rs. 50 lakh in banks but did not file tax returns or responded to concerned Income Tax advisories. All these notices will be issued under Section 142 (1) of the I-T Act that pertains to inquiry before assessment.

Later 30,000 scrutiny notices will be issued to those whose tax returns and deposits reflected huge deviation from their past data or large monetary transactions were performed in their accounts post demonetisation.

A total of 20,572 tax returns shall be scrutinized by the income tax department for suspected discrepancies post demonetisation.

In the next month, the department will issue notices to those who deposited cash between Rs 25 lakh and Rs 50 lakh post demonetisation. The crackdown is part of the 'Operation Clean Money' which was launched by the government in January this year.
These activities, they said, are part of the 'Operation Clean Money' that was initiated by the tax department in January this year to check black money generation post the note ban.

An I-T Dept official said, ""We will again ask people who made bank deposits of over Rs 50 lakh to respond to our notices. If they do not cooperate, we will begin the legal action. A similar thing would be initiated against those who have made deposits less than Rs 50 lakh but over Rs 25 lakh".

The search and seizure operations conducted by the department led to the unearthing of assets worth Rs. 900 crore of which Rs. 636 crore was reported to be in cash. Also it let to the discovery of undisclosed income to the tunes of Rs 7,961 crore.

With Inputs from PTI