Duplicate and Fake PAN

Moneylife Digital Team 22 August 2017

Economy & Nation

James Wilson, a civil engineer from Kerala, has been unearthing and exposing several false claims made by regulators and the Central government using their own published data. Union minister of state for finance, Santosh Kumar Gangwar, in a written reply, informed the Rajya Sabha that, as on 27 July 2017, about 1.14 million permanent account numbers (PANs) have been identified and deleted or de-activated. The minister also said that 1,566 PANs were identified as fake which were allotted to non-existent persons or in the name of persons with false identities. This claim prompted Mr Wilson to check and verify data about PAN cards.

What he found from the “Question and Answers from Parliament” was startling. In 2007, the then finance minister, P Chidambaram, while replying to a query from Sushma Swaraj, had said that assessing officers had already completed de-duplication work of 1.14 million PAN-holders. “The total number of duplicate PAN cards, which are likely to be cancelled, can only be ascertained after the exercise relating to de-duplication is over,” the minister had said. Over the past 10 years, only a few thousand more PAN cards were identified and deleted—despite coercing people to link PAN with Aadhaar. In any case, this is a miniscule portion of the over 250 million PAN cards issued so far. Then what is the government’s objective of linking Aadhaar and PAN? Is it only surveillance?

Comments

User

sahooabhayacharana

6 years ago

Hlw how are u

Sameer

7 years ago

Hli

A BANERJEE

9 years ago

The job of issuing PAN is not with the Income Tax Department, a statutory body , but with a separate body having no statutory authority to verify the authenticity, and inquire into the veracity of the statements made by an applicant for PAN. Thus, getting duplicate PAN cards or cards in bogus names with bogus addresses or in fake/bogus names is not difficult. It would be better if the responsibility of handling this job is handed back to the department.