Modi Government Forces 22 Senior Tax Officials To Retire Alleging Corruption

In a major crackdown against corrupt tax officials, 22 senior tax officers have been forced into retirement citing their alleged roles in corruption cases by the Modi Government. All the officers belong to the rank of Superintendent/AO.

A Central Board Of Indirect Taxes And Customs (CBIC) official, quoted by ANI said, “We have recently taken the bold step of compulsorily retiring a significant number of tax officials, and we will not tolerate this type of behaviour.”

Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs (CBIC) has compulsorily retired yet another 22 senior officers of the rank of Superintendent/AO under Fundamental Rule 56 (J) in the public interest, due to corruption and other charges. pic.twitter.com/848fScXJdG

— ANI (@ANI) August 26, 2019

This is the third incident of large scale sacking of tax officials by the Modi government in its second term. Earlier 15 top officials of CBIC and 12 Income Tax officers in June were compulsorily retired.

The 22 tax officers who have been forced into retirement include: KK Uikey, SR Parate, Kailash Verma, KC Mandal, MS Damor, RS Gogiya, Kishore Patel, JC Solanki, SK Mandal, Govind Ram Malviya, AU Chhapargare, S Asokaraj, Deepak M Ganeyan, Pramod Kumar, Mukesh Jain, Navneet Goyal, Achintya Kumar Pramanicik, VK Singh, DR Chaturvedi, D Ashok, Leela Mohan Singh and VP Singh.

The officers are from tax units in 12 zones, including Nagpur, Bhopal, Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Jaipur, Kolkata, Meerut, Mumbai, Bengaluru Customs, Mumbai Customs Zone II, and Chandigarh. The corruption charges include bribe for a few thousand rupees to the corruption of lakhs of rupees and other charges.

One of them was charged for allegedly taking a cut of 58 grams of gold from a man who came from Dubai to the Delhi airport carrying 1,224 grams of gold.

The Union government invoked section 56(J) of Fundamental Rules to remove these officers in the public interest. Rule 56 of Fundamental Rules states that the appropriate authority has the right to retire if it is compulsory to do so in public interest, a government servant under Fundamental Rules 56 (j), (i) or Rule 48 (1) (b) of CCS (Pension) Rules, 1972.

Supreme Court maintained that the government is not required to show-cause the officer before prematurely terminating his services.

“Some black sheep in the tax administration may have misused their powers and harassed taxpayers, either by targeting honest assesses or by taking extreme action for minor or procedural violations. We have recently taken the bold step of compulsorily retiring a significant number of tax officials, and we will not tolerate this type of behaviour,” Prime Minister Modi had said in his Independence Day speech.

With the sacking of 22 CBIC officers, total 49 tax officers of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) and Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) have been sacked within three months of PM Modi’s second term.

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