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Government of India to issue biometric PAN cards

Posted on April, Friday 15, 2011 By ITVARNews Network

In a move that is likely to push usage of biometrics as a technology to another notch up, the government of India has decided to issue biometric PAN cards to taxpayers across the country to weed out the problem of duplicate and fake ones.

The decision was taken recently by the Finance Ministry and it comes in the wake of a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report that asked the Income Tax department to ensure that a single tax payer is not issued multiple cards.

The proposed new biometric Permanent Account Number (PAN) cards would bear the I-T assessee's fingerprints (two from each hand) and the face. In addition to this, there could be an option to existing PAN card holders to opt for the biometric cards, but it may not be mandatory, industry experts believe.

The Finance Ministry and the I-T department had put on hold the biometric PAN card project last year to avoid duplication with the UID numbers to be issued by Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI).

The biometric PAN card was proposed by the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram in 2006 to counter the problem of duplicate PAN cards which were uncovered during I-T searches and raids by police and other enforcement agencies.

The CAG report for 2010-11 on direct taxes, tabled in Parliament recently, has revealed that 958 lakh (95.8 million) PANs were issued up to March 2010 but I-T returns filed in the last fiscal were only
340.9 lakh (34.09 million).

Suggesting the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to identify the reasons for the gap and use the information to enhance the assessee base, the CAG has said it may be due to issuance of multiple PAN cards and death of some PAN card holders.

While PAN is a 10-digit alphanumeric number allotted by the I-T department to taxpayers, biometrics uses biological method to identify physical features of an individual.

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