By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, MAY 24, 2015: THE Union Finance Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley, will inaugurate the 31st Annual Conference of Principal Chief Commissioners of Income Tax, Principal Director Generals of Income Tax, Chief Commissioners of Income Tax and Director Generals of Income Tax in the national Capital tomorrow.

Mr Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Finance, Mr Shakti Kanta Das, Revenue Secretary, the senior officials of Revenue Department including M Anita Kapur, Chairperson, CBDT and Members of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) along with the senior officers of the Ministry of Finance and Income Tax Department will also attend the aforesaid Conference.

The thrust areas at two day Conference are non-adversarial tax regime, expeditious settlement of taxpayers’ grievances and significant expansion of tax base. The participants will deliberate on the strategies to achieve the goals of the Department in these areas. The participants will also deliberate on matters pertaining to income tax investigations and issues relating to human resource development among others. Target for Revenue Collections in case of Direct Taxes has been fixed at Rs.7,97,995 crore during Financial Year(B.E.) 2015-16 which is 14.66 higher than the actual collections of Rs 6,95,988 crore during 2014-15. Besides it, various strategies for revenue augmentation including to augment Advance Tax, TDS Collections, Regular Assessment Tax Collections, Self Assessment Tax, and Dividend Distribution Tax among others will also be discussed during the two day Conference.

The participants will also be addressed by two Guest Speakers, Mr Arvind Panagariya, Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog and Mr Babasaheb Neelkanth Kalyani, Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), Bharat Forge Ltd.

The Conference will provide an opportunity to senior officers of the Income Tax Department to brainstorm and firm-up their approach in regard to priority concerns of the Department. Further, they would share their expertise and domain knowledge and learn from each others’ experiences to better achieve the Department’s objective of providing quality tax payer services in a non adversarial manner. The environment so created is expected to remove barriers to compliance and lead to significant increase in the number of tax payers over the year.