The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case against three Income-Tax Department officials and nine beneficiaries for allegedly facilitating fraudulent refunds of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS).
The accused officials have been identified as Abhay Kant, Saurabh Singh, and Rohit Kumar. They were posted in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar. They misused the RSA authentication tokens of Assessing Officers to generate fake TDS refunds to the tune of ₹1.39 crore from August 1, 2020, till August 25, 2021, in the case of 11 assessees. The related information was fed in the old Assessment Information System instead of the Income-Tax Business Application.
Out of the total amount, about ₹35 lakh was deposited back to the government account by the accused officials as taxes against the demands raised by the Department. A further sum of over ₹22.38 lakh was recovered by the Assessing Officers by way of coercive action by them on benefiting assessees. The total outstanding on account of the alleged fraud was more than ₹94.39 lakh.
