Mumbai, July 31: The government will begin collecting all the virtual information of a person’s pictures uploaded on social networking site Facebook. These pictures of one’s shiny new car or an exotic holiday cottage may lead the Income Tax officials to the person’s door. With this, the government will look at the residents’ spending patterns with income declarations, reports TOI. This is called ‘Project Insight’ and it will complement the world’s largest biometric identity database and India’s most ambitious tax overhaul as policymakers try to get more people to pay up. It took seven years to build at a cost of about Rs 1,000 crore.
The tax officials will spot those people who pay too little tax without raiding offices and homes only by viewing their post activities on Facebook. “This will put an end to harassment by tax officials as there will be no public interface,” said Amit Maheshwari, managing partner at an accountancy firm near New Delhi. This method is already used by countries like Belgium, Canada and Australia to unearth the tax evasion that sometimes goes undetected without technology. Finance ministry spokesman D S Malik declined to comment on Project Insight. The BJP government said last year it had contracted L&T Infotech Ltd to help build the network and boost voluntary compliance.
