Over 60,000 people are under the scanner of tax authorities under the second phase of Operation Clean Money, which was launched to detect black money hoarders after the demonetisation of high-value currency notes last year.

“More than 60,000 persons, including 1,300 high-risk persons, have been identified for investigation into claims of excessive cash sales during the demonetisation period,” said the Finance Ministry on Friday.

High-risk categories that are being probed by the tax department include businesses claiming cash sales as the source of cash deposits that are disproportionately larger than their past profile or industry norms.

Deposits under watch Also under investigation are large cash deposits made by government or public sector undertaking employees; persons who have undertaken high-value purchases; persons who have used shell entities for layering of funds; and where no responses were received to enquiries made in the first round.

“The identification has been done through use of advanced data analytics, including integration of data sources, relationship clustering and fund tracking,” it said.

Additionally, over 6,000 transactions of high-value property purchase and 6,600 cases of outward remittances will be investigated under the operation. The Income-Tax Department will also investigate all cases where it did not receive any response to its initial enquiries.

The Income-Tax Department had launched Operation Clean Money on January 31 and had sent e-verification queries to 17.92 lakh people who made cash transactions during the demonetisation period in November and December last year, which did not match their tax profile.

According to the Finance Ministry, 9.46 lakh people responded to the queries on pre-defined parameters of sources of the cash deposits. Online queries were raised in 35,000 cases and on-line verification was completed in more than 7,800 cases.

“It has been decided to close the verification in cases where the explanation of the source of cash was found to be justified,” it said.

The Ministry said that the complete exercise of examining all the doubtful and non-tax compliant accounts may take more than one year.

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