WITH the year ending in a few days, the CBDT has come out with the highlights of the steps taken by the CBDT in the last one year.

In case of non-residents, a balance has been made to allocate taxation rights between the source State and the State of residence of the non-residents on the basis of the provisions of the Income-Tax Act and the provisions of Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs). Advance Pricing Mechanism (APA) has been notified so as to assist taxpayers to obtain certainty on their transfer pricing matters.

Similarly, Safe Harbour Rules have been notified for the purpose of ensuring certainty in transfer price declared by the taxpayer in respect of eligible international transactions. Safe harbour means circumstances in which the Income-tax Authority shall accept the transfer price declared by the assessee. The rules have been drafted after taking inputs from stakeholders.

The General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) have been incorporated to counter undesirable aggressive tax planning in a moderate tax regime and are to apply for income of the financial year 2015-16 and subsequent years.

Extensive use of technology is being made for collection of information without intrusive methods. 360 degree profiling of taxpayers and potential taxpayers is being done for gathering information regarding their sources of income and spending habits. Information technology tools are being developed for exhaustive collection of information and maintenance of database. Information collected from returns of income and other sources is collated so that specific targeted action can be taken against the tax evaders.

The scope of annual information returns has been expanded, e-payment facility through more banks has been extended, the refund banker system has been expanded and e-filing has been made mandatory for more categories of assessees. The Income-tax department is rapidly moving towards technology-based processing as would be evident from the Central Processing Cell (CPC) set-up at Bengaluru and the Central Processing Cell-TDS at Vaishali, Ghaziabad.