Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance has submitted its annual report on the status of black and unaccounted money detected by the agency for the financial year 2013-14. It is computed at rupees 7,800 crores within the country and abroad. Of this unaccounted money, Rs 7,078 crore are detected by the Income Tax Department while the Customs and Service Tax Departments detected evasion of Rs 750 crore during the period under discussion. Apart from this the Enforcement Department has also confiscated properties worth hundreds of crores as these are found disproportionate to the income of the assessees.
We appreciate the action of the Finance Ministry of tightening the grip on unauthorized and unaccounted money generally called black money. The issue of Indian nationals stashing black money in foreign banks has been hanging fire for quite some time and the Governments in the past and also the present one have been grappling with retrieval of these monies after fulfilling legal formalities. But the point that we would like to make is that the income that is not accounted for inside the country is in no way small and ignorable. We appreciate the initiative taken by the Finance Ministry in this behalf and feel convinced that it will have positive and healthy results.