【New Delhi】Tax proceedings have begun against Swiss bank account holders, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told the Lok Sabha Friday.
Responding to a query from BJP member Anurag Thakur during a discussion on the union budget, Jaitley said: "Tax proceedings have begun...". He said that "SIT (Special Investigating Team) is going into it" and details are being given to it. The minister added that the government is "in process of communicating with the Swiss authorities".
○Modi govt committed to lower taxes: FM
【New Delhi】The Modi government is committed to lower taxes, finance minister Arun Jaitley told TOI in his first interview to a newspaper after the Budget.
It was an article of faith with him as well as the Prime Minister that lower taxes gave people money to spend which, in turn, fuelled economic growth, he said. In this context, he clarified that the "bitter pill" referred to by Modi didn't mean higher taxes. The rub could lie, he said, in people being asked to pay more for utilities. He said, "Bitter pill could mean that for utilities the user will pay for what they use. Unless users pay, utilities can't survive." This could mean higher electricity charges as well as a cut in subsidies.
○Jaitley's fiscal deficit target of 3% by 2017 an audacious bet on high growth in the years ahead
【New Delhi】One of the criticisms of finance minister Arun Jaitley's first budget is that it is big on details and short on vision, or a grand plan of any sort.
Much has been made of the fact that the minister has stuck to the 4.1% fiscal deficit target specified by his predecessor P Chidambaram in the interim budget earlier this year. Backing this though is some maths that can only be described as optimistic, especially when the fiscal deficit has already crossed half its annual budgeted target.
Jaitley has projected a jump in tax revenues of close to 18% for the year. In addition he hopes for a bunch of other non-tax items to further plug the deficit — revenues from disinvestment for instance, which are projected to rise from Rs 25,000 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 63,000 crore in 2014-15. Another big boost is expected from telecom spectrum auctions (Rs 45,000 crore), and from dividends and profits transferred to the government from public sector undertakings (PSUs) and other bodies (Rs 90,000 crore).
But even if Jaitley explicitly failed to spell out such a vision for the economy in his long speech, there was one for fixing government finances that was implicit in the voluminous range of documents that the government submitted to parliament on Thursday.
【News source】
Tax proceedings against Swiss account holders: Jaitley
Modi government committed to lower taxes, finance minister Arun Jaitley says
Arun Jaitley's fiscal deficit target of 3% by 2017 an audacious bet on high growth in the years ahead
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