Your emails to the IT dept may soon get a response

Finally, your mails to the IT department may have a response. The Income Tax Department, the department has asked its customer care centres to effectively monitor email-based complaints of assesses and diligently send them to tax officers.

The new directive comes at a time when Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has unveiled two taxpayer-friendly initiatives of the department to envisage faster complaint resolution. Under the new instructions, the Aaykar Sampark Kendras (ASK) have been asked to forward emails received from the taxpayers to range in-charges who will subsequently send it to jurisdictional Assessing Officers (AOs) henceforth.

"The region heads will keep track of the complaints of their jurisdictions and hence will ensure better monitoring of the complaints," a senior official told PTI.

As per earlier norms, these complaints were used to be sent to the AO but were not monitored at various levels of hierarchy, which will be done now.

In some cases, they were forwarded by the ASK to the AO through snail mail and not email, which will done in all cases now.

The ASKs or the I-T customer care centres, are meant to answer queries related to the status of Permanent Account Number and Tax deduction Account Number applications, procedure of filing of Income Tax and Wealth Tax returns, refund related grievances and for redressal of other general queries over phone calls or email.