Since this week, the Income Tax (I-T) portal, largely used for filing returns, has introduced a tab where taxpayers can file complaints against an officer who allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct or sought a bribe.
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Until now, there was no standard online recourse to report such misbehaviour.
Need for confidentiality
Practitioners say if there is a central repository for such complaints and assessees’ names are kept confidential, the mechanism would work.
“For years, an honest taxpayer had no secure route other than approaching the erring officer’s superior who could choose to look the other way or navigate through the CVO’s office. Embedding a channel into the e-filing portal collapses that distance. If the government now administers it centrally, similar to CPGRAMS, with the complainant’s identity protected and every complaint given a tracking number and a time-bound resolution through some central division, it may do something rare in tax administration: shift a little power back to the ordinary assessee,” said Rahul Garg, managing partner, Asire Consulting, which advises on matters like tax and data privacy.
CPGRAMS or the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System is the government’s flagship digital grievance redressal platform.A taxpayer logging into the portal using a username and password, can click the tabs ‘Grievances’ followed by ‘Submit Grievance’ which then open into categories like ‘Corruption’ and ‘Misbehaviour/Harassment/Sexual Harassment’. The real test, however, is not digital filing but how the complaint is handled thereafter, said chartered accountant Ashish Karundia. “Since the e-filing ecosystem contains highly sensitive financial and personal information, there should be complete clarity on who can access the complaint and the information submitted with it, particularly whether the officer complained against can access any part of it. So there should be enough safeguards to ensure that the complainant is not victimised for raising a genuine grievance,” said Karundia.
Option to file detailed report
Significantly, the portal gives an aggrieved taxpayer the scope to file a detailed report that could be as long as 3,000 words. While direct dealings between taxpayers and the taxman have reduced with faceless assessments, face-to-face interactions continue in matters related to search and seizure, international tax, and Black Money cases on offshore assets and income.
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According to Priyanka Sinha, partner at the law firm A&P Partners, “The introduction of such a grievance tab is a positive move. Yet its true value will be determined by execution as to who conducts the inquiry, how promptly it is carried out, and whether those who come forward are protected from any bearing on their future assessments. In the absence of robust confidentiality safeguards, an independent oversight body separate from the department needs to be established, as many taxpayers may hesitate to place full trust in the process.”