21000 Vacancies in Income Tax Department

There has been huge shortage of manpower in Income Tax Department for years and IT department has been putting this as an excuse for the loss in the tax collections over years. Few months back, a proposal was given to government to hire tax personnel at various levels to boost tax collections, which has been accepted now.

In one of the largest-ever recruitment drives by a government agency, the Union cabinet on Thursday cleared a plan to create 20,750 additional posts in the Income Tax department, including revenue service officers, as a part of a drive to step up scrutiny and increase annual collections by Rs 25,000 crore.

After the meeting, Chidambaram said the posts to be created as part of the cadre restructuring exercise will include 1,349 additional posts in the Indian Revenue Service. The recruitment is to be done over a period of time and the decision will help the I-T department collect higher revenue and provide better services to tax payers, the minister said.

The tax department has for long complained of insufficient manpower impacting collections. The latest move is expected to cost around Rs 450 crore annually. “This additional expenditure would be more than compensated by the increased revenue of more than Rs 25,000 crore per annum proposed to be generated as a result of this exercise,” Chidambaram said. TNN.

The recruitment in the Income tax Department will be done at various levels, but, it is still unclear whether this recruitment will be conducted through Staff Selection Commission (SSC) or Income Tax Department will manage the recruitment process on it own. Since, approval has been given for the recruitment process, the details of the recruitment process will be made public shortly.