The Income Tax (IT) Department on claims to have unearthed racket that extracted fraudulent tax refunds by employees of about 50 Bengaluru companies like IBM, Vodafone, and Infosys reported PTI. An unidentified Chartered Accountant (CA) was the alleged connivance.

An investigation was conducted on the premises of the CA on Wednesday and the investigating unit claims to have seized bogus claim documents and WhatsApp chat messages.

The department said that the CA helped in false income tax returns by making fraudulent refund claims of loss from house property. Nearly 1,000 returns with a loss from house property aggregating to loss claim of Rs 18 crore till now.

Over 50 employees of medium-sized and prominent companies were clients of this unnamed CA.

"It is noted that employees from some of the reputed companies such as IBM, Vodafone, Saplabs, Biocon, Infosys, ICICI Bank, CISCO, Thomson Reuters India Limited among others have also resorted to such fraudulent claim of refunds by filing revised returns of their individual income," the department said.

"They also deposed that, out of the refund received, the auditor (CA) had charged 10% as incidental charges. Some WhatsApp messages with auditor were also shown by them, as supporting evidence," it said.

The CA has told the department that he filed those bogus claim refunds at the "insistence of his clients".