Recovery wing-Recommendations of Public Accounts Committee. - Income Tax - 1642/CBDT

INSTRUCTION NO. 1642/CBDT Dated: July 29, 1985 Reference is invited to Boards instructions. No. 1520, dated 20th July 1983 as amended by Instruction No.1542 dated 3rd December 1983 whereby the need for having proper co-ordination between the ITO TRO and for imparting training to the staff in the Recovery wing etc., was communicated to you. In pursuance of the recommendations made by the Public Accounts Committee (1983-84) in para 5.18 of its 217th report the board entrusted to DOMS the conduct of a comprehensive study particularly the efficiency of the TROs. Extracts of the observations and recommendations made by DOMS in this regard are given below:- It is observed that very junior officers are being posted as Tax Recovery Officers. Information obtained in respect of the metropolitan charges illustrate this point. From the above chart it is seen that in Delhi and Calcutta charges all the TROs are ITOs Group B with less than 5 years experience. In other charges also majority of the officers posted as TROs are junior officers. In none of the charges any ITO in Group A senior scale has been posted as a Tax Recovery officer. It may be pointed out that a TRO has to tackle many complicated problems which require knowledge not only of Income Tax law but also a various other laws including transfer of property Act, Civil procedure code etc., He has to deal with assessees who are not very straight forward and have managed to delay the payment of taxes for a long time. It may not be therefore possible for a newly promoted officer to tackle those problems effectively. It is therefore recommended that some senior Group A Income Tax Officers should be posted as Tax Recovery Officers for handling high demand and more complicated cases of recovery. Quality of Staff Even in Metropolitan charges where Commissioners of Income-tax(R) are functioning the entire staff is under t he administrative control of CIT I who posts the staff with the TROs. It has been found that it has become almost a practice to post either newly promoted Inspectors of staff in tax recovery officer unit or even worse, condemned staff. It is therefore not surprising that the TROs are not able to extract work from such staff. In any office, there is bound to be some more efficient and some less efficient staff. The point to be made is that the TRO should not as a rule have inefficient staff members only. C.I.T.(Admn) should therefore provide a fair-mix of competent and not so competent staff for the Tax Recovery officers. 2. The recommendations made by the Review committee in this regard have been considered and accepted by the board. The Board desires that the above recommendations be kept in mind by the Commissioners while posting officers and staff to the Recovery wing.