The Income-Tax department today launched the “refund banker” scheme that enables income tax assesses to get tax refunds directly from designated banks within three working days.Launched as a pilot project in some circles of Delhi and Patna, the State Bank of India, which would be the refund bank during the pilot phase, would refund payments either by cheque or into the bank account of the assessee in case the assessee has opted to ECS payments.The concept behind this scheme is similar to operations of an initial public offer and in this case a scheduled bank would be authorised to issue refund instruments on behalf of the income-tax department.Finance Minister P Chidambaram said the initiative would refund payments quickly without the fear of being subject to “fraud or failure”. This would, in turn, give confidence to assessees that their refunds would be made on time. While describing prompt re-payments as an important element of boosting the tax collection drive, Chidambaram also admitted that the current tax refund mechanism was subject to people playing fraud with the system by “forging of challans” or for that matter even issuing bogus cheques.In that regard, using IT, the refund bank concerned can directly make refunds to assessees once instructions are sent from the I-T department concerned of the circle.
