Chirag Desai


How much of DeMo deposits were black?

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From Arun Jaitley’s budget speech:

142. During the period 8 November to 30 December 2016, deposits between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 80 lakh were made in about 1.09 crore accounts with an average deposit size of Rs 5.03 lakh.

This amounts to INR5.48 lakh crores. On average though, what percentage of people who have INR 5 lakhs+ in cash have it for say a wedding or house purchase due to the requirement of cash/black money? Also, this is based on deposits made, so perhaps more than one deposit could have been made by the same person in different accounts, which will be tallied down the road.

This would imply that a decent volume of this cash could be both probed, and result in further tax collections.

Further:

Deposits of more than Rs 80 lakh were made in 1.48 lakh accounts with average deposit size of Rs 3.31 crores.

That’s another INR 4.89 lakh crore, and again, questions would be raised about availability of cash per person in excess of 3 crores.

This would imply that a good percentage of about INR 10 lakh crores of deposits (out of a total INR 15.44 lakh crores estimated to be in circulation) will result in tax collections.

So far, about 18 lakh notices have already been sent out in cases where deposits do not seem to be inline with income tax returns.