PM Modi's new weapon to invade your social media posts

Your personal social media account could possibly be invaded by taxman to identify those paying too less tax in order to save wastage of manpower in raids.

Zee Media Bureau/Smriti Srivastava

New Delhi: Government is all set to begin poking around social media sites of tax payers under the new big data plan - 'Project Insight'. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's new weapon possibly aims at checking tax invasion through virtual information drive with an experimental twist. The concerned authorities, garnering this information, will track your social media posts along with the bank statements. This will help them to sketch the gap between citizens' spending practice and income declaration.

If you are spending holidays at some exotic location but earning less than a sum of 6-digit salary per month, you better watch out now!

Your personal social media account could possibly be invaded by taxman to identify the defaulters in order to save on manpower wastage in raids.

Key Highlighters of the 'Project Insight'

• Modi’s 'Project Insight' is a seven-year project that is estimated to cost 10 billion (US$156 million) in Indian currency.
  
• It will embrace several parts, including the world’s most ambitious biometric identity database, and the ongoing tax reform project the government is undertaking.
  
• It will use data mining, big data and analytics to dig out tax evaders from social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
  
• The PAN will be the unique identifier to be used by I-T department to analyse and link various transactions related to the tax payers.
  
• It will also improve the ability of the department to monitor the flow of funds, provide an audit trail of high value transactions and constraint circulation of black money.
  
• It will also develop streamlined data exchange mechanism for other government departments.
  
• The Reporting Compliance Management System of project will ensure that the third party reporting by entities like banks and other financial institutions is accurate and well-timed.
  
• Project Insight behaves as an integrated platform in widening of tax-base and data mining to track tax evaders.