New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a single page tax payers charter on Thursday via televised conference and promised a seamless, painless and faceless appeal mechanism from next month. Modi urged citizens to be more tax complaint, pointing to the fact there are just 1.5 crore taxpayers in a country with a population of 130 crore.

He expanded the faceless assessment scheme to all taxpayers. Under this system, a taxpayer will not have an opportunity to know people in the tax department or exert influence, he said. Minutes of his speech, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) expanded the scope of the faceless assessment launched last year and asked its officers to pass all assessment orders via the National e- Assessment Centre.

Whilst the initiative should work well for relatively smaller businesses, larger businesses whose returns tend to be more complex may find it challenging to comply with large amount of data requirements during a faceless assessment and inability to discuss and defend their positions in person with a tax officer. Here, one idea which should be considered is meditation, which even CJI has expressed on morethan one occasion.

While the PM suggested the new platform for honest taxpayers was a structural reform initiative, six months after the plan for a charter was unveiled, the income tax department is yet to detail the service standards or the timeliness for resolution of issues. The attempt is to make the tax system, seamless, painless and faceless. The tax administration should be seamless so that it solves the problem instead of complicating matters. Technology and simple rules will make the system painless.

And, faceless in a way that the tax payers and tax officer should not be bothered, said Modi in a televised speech. He said the idea is to response greater trust in the tax payer, pointing to the number of cases being taken up for scrutiny.