According to high priority to issues related to taxpayers’ grievances, CBDT has brought a new mechanism where top officers of the IT department have been allotted a specific quota of complaints to monitor and track, from their origin to successful resolution.

The new initiative has come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently held a meeting on the subject on March 23 under the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System portal where he expressed the view that “high-level monitoring of public grievances is necessary”.

Following the prime minister’s instructions, a senior official said, the Central Board of Direct Taxes has ordered that all members of the Board and officers in the ranks of Principal Chief Commissioner and Principal Directors General will “personally examine” 10 grievances each, every week.

Similarly, all Chief Commissioners, Principal Commissioners and Commissioners of Income Tax will individually monitor 20 and 30 grievances respectively, every week.

The overall assessment and resolution status of the grievances compiled for a month will be forwarded to the CBDT by the first week of the succeeding month which will be subsequently sent to the Prime Minister’s Office and

Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances for review, they said.

The official said the measure will not only ensure accountability in effective grievance redressal but also give a clear and real-time picture of the subject.

CBDT has also recently created a new structure in the IT department to exclusively deal with taxpayers’ grievances and complaints related to delay in issue of refunds, problems in filing tax returns among others.