A ‘PAN-India’ Loss: RoC Does Not Have The Details Of 95 Per Cent Real Estate Firms, Says CAG Report; Revenue Hit

According to a CAG report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday (12 January), the Registrar of Companies (RoC) did not possess PAN information of more than 95 per cent real estate companies.

“RoC did not have information about PAN in respect of 51,670 (95 per cent) of a total of 54,578 companies for which data was made available to audit,” stated the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report.

RoC maintains a database of all companies that register with them at the time of their incorporation. The companies are required to file annual returns with them using the Permanent Account Number (PAN) allocated to them.

Though the CAG’s office forwarded the information received from RoCs without PAN data to the Income Tax Department (ITD) to ascertain whether these companies were filing Income Tax Returns or not, no reply was received from ITD.

The watchdog concluded that “there is no mechanism with ITD to ensure that all the registered companies have PAN and are filing their ITRs regularly.”

Loss To The Exchequer

The CAG noticed that there were 1,183 mistakes (approx.imately7 per cent of the audited sample) out of the total 78,647 assessments made by ITD during the financial years 2013-14 to 2016-17. These mistakes had a “tax effect of Rs 6,093.71 crore, thus causing loss of revenue to the government.”

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