-The Business Standard   2011 saw jump in total disputed amount to Rs 4.37 lakh crore The quantity of money locked in income tax disputes has seen a sharp rise in 2011, with more aggression by the tax department. The disputed amount jumped from Rs 2,43,603 crore to Rs 4,36,741 crore between January and December 2011. The disclosure was made by the finance ministry in reply to a question in the Lok Sabha...

Drug smugglers and third-world dictators laundering ill-gotten wealth through secretive banking systems in tax havens is an anachronistic image from crime novels. Leveraging US' remarkable success in compelling tax havens to block terrorist financing, the G20/OECD have successfully persuaded tax havens to improve tax transparency and participate in an international regime of information exchange.  All tax havens have committed to OECD standards for tax transparency and are executing Tax Information Exchange...

Most of us don’t even get a single shot at making history — Manmohan Singh has a second chance The fiscal deficit is an outcome, not a policy. It is the net resolution of the policies pertaining to taxes and expenditure. It is worth analysing separately the two components of the deficit. The table reports the results of relating the tax and expenditure share of GDP to per capita income for...

-The Telegraph Dispur today said the state’s economy was “performing well” when the country’s overall growth rate was projected to be affected by the economic meltdown in Europe. The principal secretary of the state finance department, Himangshu Sekhar Das, said Assam had not borrowed any money from the market in the current fiscal (2011-12) and its tax collection had recorded an increase of 33 per cent, most of which had come from...

Investigations say they have already mopped up a “massive amount” — running into “hundreds of crores” — as unpaid taxes from among the 700 numbered bank accounts held by Indians in HSBC Bank in Geneva in the ongoing scrutiny of what is considered a sprawling black money trail. In fact, Rs 40 crore has been recovered from Delhi-based account holders and Rs 60 crore from just one account holder in Chennai...