Seventy-nine lakh new income tax filers were added to the economy between 2014-15 and 2012-13 assesssment years.
According to the data released by the government, as many as 54,921 assessees had a salary of ₹50 lakh to ₹1 crore in 2014-15. But, there were just 10 individuals who earned salaries of over ₹50 crore and only two individuals had earned over ₹100 crore.
The data was released by the Income Tax Department on Wednesday. It revealed that the number of income tax filers rose to 3.91 crore in the assessment year 2014-15 from 3.12 crore in 2012-13.
“Continuing commitment to transparency, the Finance Ministry has released detailed income tax data for 2013-14 and 2014-15,” said Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian.
However, the data also revealed that while more taxpayers were added to the system, a significant chunk of the filers did not have any actual tax outgo.
The trend was more prominent in the case of individual tax payers though 65 lakh new taxpayers were added to the system between the assessment years 2014-15 and 2012-13.
Of the 3.65 crore income tax filers in the assessment years 2014-15, 1.74 crore did not pay any tax. The remaining 1.91 crore had a collective tax outgo of ₹1.91 lakh crore.
Companies category Similarly, about 75,000 new companies began filing their tax returns in the period under review although just 45,000 companies started paying taxes.
The number of tax filing companies rose to 7.01 lakh in the assessment year 2014-15 from 5.81 lakh in 2012-13.
The number of companies that did not have a tax outgo rose to 3.66 lakh in assessment year 2014-15 from 2.91 lakh in 2012-13. The data comes at a time when the government is trying to curb tax evasion and black money through efforts such as the Income Disclosure Scheme that closed last month.
Officials note that the data points to improved compliance that has also helped increase tax collections of the government.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had also recently stressed that efforts must be made to make more people tax compliant, as it would provide more resources to spend on developmental needs of the country as well as security.