What is income?

Income, under the Income-Tax Act, includes salary, pension, rental income, profits from businesses or profession, profits from assets, interest incomes, dividends and royalty income.

Whoever gets an income comes has to pay income tax and income from be salary, pension or interest from a savings account.

Income falls into five categories:

• Income from Salary and pension,
• Income from other sources (interest from savings bank account, recurring and fixed deposits
• Income from House Property
• Income from Capital Gains (Sale of a capital assets such as houses, mutual funds and shares.)
• Income from Business and Profession

Taxpayers include individuals, Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), Association of Persons(AoP) and Body of Individuals (BoI), firms and companies

Companies (and firms) are taxed at a flat rate of tax of 30 per cent of profits.

Individuals, Hindu Undivided Family, Association of Persons and Body of Individuals are taxed based on the income slab they fall under.

Individual's ncomes are grouped into tax slabs with differing rates.

Residents and NRIs:

Individuals who are resident in India must pay tax on their global income in India, whereas those who qualify as Non-residents must pay taxes only on their Indian income. The residential status has to be determined separately for every financial year.

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Some developments on income-tax:

Faceless and jurisdiction-less assessment

The Finance Ministry recently launched the second phase of faceless and jurisdiction-less income tax assessment of 1,32,000 assessees. The process will bring down corruption as the tax assessees will not know the Assessing Officers.

Fresh orders were issued by the CBDT to initiate the new tax assessment process under which the assessees will face limited scrutiny under the IT Act.

The official said faceless and jurisdiction-less income tax assessment was started in 2018 and already over two lakh assessment cases were handled online by the IT Department. Under this strategy for breaking the cycle of corruption, an Assessing Officer (AO) based out of Sikkim is randomly given tax assessment of taxpayer registered out of Kochi.

In the second phase, all the communication between the two will have to be made through a centralised assessment centre, which will issue notices to the taxpayers, the official said.

The official pointed out that the questionnaires prepared by the AOs will be sent to the assessees through the centre. Replies from the assessees will be addressed to the centralised centre and subsequently forwarded to AOs.

The AOs will know the assessees as their tax papers will be studied by them but as all the communication will have to be made through the centre, the chances of each party influencing the other will be remote, the official said.

No relief under serious cases

Indulgence in serious criminal cases of money laundering, terror financing, corruption, possession of benami properties and undisclosed foreign assets will virtually shut a person's chances of getting relief in an income tax evasion offence.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes has issued a revised 32-page guideline for 'compounding of offences under direct tax laws, 2019' which will be executed under the I-T Act, 1961.

The new directives make it clear that compounding of offences is "not a matter of right" and the department can extend such a relief only in certain cases keeping in view factors like "conduct of the person, the nature and magnitude of the offence on the context of the facts and circumstances of each case."

Compounding in I-T parlance means that the taxman does not file a prosecution case against the offender or tax evader in the court in lieu of payment of due taxes and surcharges and it is dealt under section 279(2)

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