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Recovery sees senior tax
personnel switch to lucrative private sector
Over the past two months, at
least a dozen senior officers of the Income-tax Department, belonging to the
elite Indian Revenue Service (IRS), have opted for voluntary retirement, a
government scheme that allows them to quit before the statutory retirement age.
These officers are likely to end up in the private sector, most likely as
consultants, to get around rules that prevent government employees from working
within a year of quitting.
The senior-most among these
officials is V. K. Mangotra, Chief Commissioner of Income-tax in Ahmedabad.
Before taking up his most recent post, Mr. Mangotra was the Director of the
Mumbai-based transfer pricing division of the Income-tax Department that
exclusively deals with the issue of taxing cross-border transactions involving
multinational companies.
Most officers from the
government’s tax-collecting arms, who have quit in the past, have ended up
consulting for global accounting firms.
Another officer dealing with
transfer pricing, Alpana Saxena, currently based in Mumbai, has also put in her
papers.
According to I-T officials,
the prospect of earning more by consulting for and later joining either
multinational companies or the Indian arms of global accounting firms is
tempting. S. P. Singh, who resigned in 2005 as the Director of International
Taxation, Mumbai, is now a partner with Deloitte India in New Delhi. He joined
the global accounting firm a year after his retirement, having practised as a
freelance consultant in the interim. Mr. Singh told ET, “There is not much
difference between what I was doing in the Department and what I am doing now,
which is to ensure the legal accuracy of the work put out by my team. While in
the Department, I had to work on maximising revenue realisation, in Deloitte, I
have to devise the best tax structure
for the client”.
An I-T Commissioner draws a
gross salary of Rs.80,000 a month, but this shrinks to a take-home of Rs.40,000
after paying tax and other statutory deductions. A Commissioner is entitled to a
chauffeur-driven car and a house in up-market locales like South Mumbai. On the
other hand, a private firm can pay anywhere between Rs.2.5 lakh and Rs.3.5 lakh
per month to an officer who holds the rank of Commissioner.
(Source : The Times of India, dated 11-2-2010)
