PAN to be must for cash deals

Jaitley Facebook post mentions govt’s monitoring initiatives

New Delhi : The government will soon make it mandatory to furnish the tax department-allotted Permanent Account Number (PAN) details for cash transactions beyond a certain threshold, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Sunday.

"The government is at an advanced stage in considering the requirement of furnishing PAN card details if cash transactions beyond a certain limit are undertaken," he said in a Facebook post. In his budget speech this year, Jaitley had proposed quoting PAN mandatory for all sale and purchase of over Rs.100,000.

The minister also said the monitoring regime of the income tax department has been strengthened and its capacity to access information and apply technology-driven tools to expose evasion has been enhanced. "Its ability to detect large cash withdrawals, or large cash transactions which enter the system, is being strengthened. GST regime once introduced will also be a landmark step in this direction," he said.

"Thus for commodities like gold where the initial purchase by the exporter is after the payment of custom duty, the subsequent transactions which are mostly in cash, can easily be found out," he added. Noting that the bulk of black money is still in the country, Jaitley said there was a need to change national attitudes so that plastic currency becomes the norm and cash an exception.

"The bulk of black money is still within India. The campaign against domestic black money has to be separately dealt with for which government is independently taking steps," he said. "We thus need a change in national attitude where plastic currency becomes the norm and cash an exception. The government has been working with various authorities in order to incentivise this change," he said.