Lucknow: Imagine selling fresh juice for a living, only to wake up one morning and find out you're supposedly running a multi-core empire—on paper, at least! That is exactly what happened to Mohammed Rahees, a humble juice vendor at the district court compound, whose biggest financial worry until now was the price of oranges.
On March 18, Rahees, a resident of Sarai Rehman, found himself staring at an income tax notice demanding a cool Rs 7.79 crore. His first reaction? Shock. His second? Asking his friends if this was some kind of prank. Baffled beyond belief, Rahees turned to his well-wishers to decode the notice. They read the notice and told him that he had been given until March 28 to cough up a response (and presumably a fortune).
“I rushed to an income tax lawyer, who suggested I first dig up my bank account records,” Rahees recounted, wondering if he had missed a secret offshore account in the Cayman Islands. Rahees earns Rs 400 a day selling juice and is the sole breadwinner for his family, including his elderly, ailing parents.
But according to the tax department, he has apparently been hiding crores somewhere in the midst of his nimbu paani anmosambi stock! “I’m so stressed that my blood pressure has gone through the roof. My mother, who already suffers from depression, has been shaken by this,” he said, still trying to figure out if he should laugh, cry, or just disappear into his juice blender.
For now, Rahees can only hope the tax authorities take one sip of reality and realise they may have squeezed the wrong lemon. Receiving astonishingly high-income tax notices is not as uncommon as one might think.
In April 2023, a resident of Madhya Pradesh, earning approximately Rs53,000 per month, was bewildered upon receiving an income tax notice demanding Rs113 crore. The tax authorities alleged underreported income linked to transactions from 2011-12, suggesting the individual was a promoter of a diamond trading company. The resident, however, claimed that apart from his PAN and photograph, none of the evidence pertained to him, indicating potential identity misuse.
It is not only the common man who gets inflated I-T notice, even political parties have it. Take the case of the Congress, which received income tax notices worth Rs3,567 crore. In March 2024, the party was served a notice for Rs1,823 crore covering assessment years 1994-95 and 2017-18 to 2020-21. Subsequently, fresh notices amounting to Rs1,745 crore were issued for assessment years 2014-15 to 2016-17. The Congress alleged that this was an act of "tax terrorism" aimed at financially crippling the opposition ahead of elections.
