By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, AUG 02, 2017: WHILE replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha yesterday, the MoS for Finance, Mr Santosh Kumar Gangwar, said that as on July 27, 2017 the Income Tax Department has identified 1,566 PANs which were allotted to either non-existent person or in the names of persons with false identities. In this regard, the PAN service provider carries out onsite verification of PAN applications to verify identity and addresses of the applicant and share the report of such verification to the concerned Assessing Officer. On receipt of such report the assessing officer also conducts enquires and mark the PAN as “Fake”. If information of allotment of more than one PAN is received, the facility to delete or de-activate the PAN is available with the Assessing Officer through application software. Further, during 2004 to 2007, an exercise for de-duplication of PAN was conducted in the Department to identify probable duplicate PANs, which were consequently deleted or de-activated by the concerned assessing officers after examinations.

Under the existing system of PAN only demographic data is captured. Some instances are found where multiple PANs have been allotted to one person or one PAN has been allotted to multiple persons despite the application of de-duplication process based on demographic data. Linkage of Aadhaar number into PAN database will allow a robust way of de-duplication as Aadhaar number is based on biometric attributes of finger prints and iris images. Further seeding of Aadhaar will allow the Income-tax Department to weed out any undetected duplicate PANs. It will also facilitate resolution of cases of one PAN allotted to multiple persons.