India had over 8.22 crore taxpayers in FY20: FM Nirmala Sitharaman informs Rajya Sabha

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

India had 8.22 crore taxpayers, which include individuals and corporates, in 2019-20, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman informed the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

"Total number of taxpayers for AY 2020-21 is 8,22,83,407. The projected total population of the country as on March 1, 2021 .... was 136.30 crore," Sitharaman said.

The number of taxpayers include persons who pay income tax and corporate tax and who have either filed a Return of Income or in whose case tax has been deducted at source.

Sitharaman further said the government has implemented the non-filers monitoring system (NMS) which assimilates and analyses in-house information as well as transactional data received from third-parties to identify such persons/entities who have undertaken high value financial transactions with potential tax liabilities but have not filed their returns.

"The (tax) department seeks to bring more non-filers into the tax net by formulating region-specific strategies by the field authorities for identifying potential non-filers, holding of outreach programmes to encourage voluntary compliance and extensive use of mass media for creating awareness, issuing statutory notices to enforce compliance, simplification in income-tax returns and filing process to encourage voluntary filing," she said.

Further, e-mails and SMS reminders are issued to taxpayers to file ITRs and pay their due taxes.