Demonetisation: Income Tax raids at Bengaluru malls

Raids were also conducted on renowned jewellery shops in the city

Bengaluru, Dec 23: Officials of the Income Tax department conducted raids on malls and jewellers including bullion traders in Bengaluru on Friday. Searches were conducted in properties belonging to jewellers and bullion merchants on the basis of the information that few bullion dealers were involved in exchanging gold bullion that was undocumented.

It was alleged that the exchange was being done on a commission basis with people having old high value demonetised notes. The transaction was being used to buy small amounts of gold bullion and jewellery.

During searches it was found that there were huge sales made during November post demonetisation as compared to last year during the same period.

Apart from receipts in RTGS in their accounts, there were also huge cash deposits. On verification it was found that more cash sales were appearing in October and November, 2016. All cash transaction were kept below Rs 2 lakh without any details regarding the customer to whom the sale was made. Income tax officials suspect that this had been done to avoid TDS and mandatory quoting of purchasers' PAN number.

Huge cash deposits in bank accounts after demonetisation were noticed in these cases. It was found that some of the jewellers had back dated the bills and even paid VAT to give the transactions a colour of genuineness. It was also found in some of these cases, that they had supressed the sales in the earlier years.

Further investigation is under process to verify the genuineness of the RTGS received in their account. Some of the jewellers are accused of not filing the income returns for the past several years. The searches have resulted in detection of undisclosed income of Rs.47.74 crores.

OneIndia News