Hello First of all, I would distinguish between 'tax avoidance' and 'tax evasion'. When we talk tax havens like Mauritius, Cyprus and Singapore, investment in real estate routed through anonymous financial instruments like Participatory Notes, they are all technically legal, but are part of the process of 'tax planning' aided by the big five accounting firms. We can't definitely say that it is 'cheating'. They follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit. As the mint article (shared by Pramit) mentions, the data specific to India that we can get is that of aggregate Foreign Direct Investment or Foreign Institutional Investment routed through these tax jurisdictions which is published by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.
All India Income Tax Statistics is a dataset that was supposed to contain income tax data according to tax brackets and also number of people in each bracket. It was not published between 2000 and 2016. But after Thomas Piketty's book 'Capital in the 21st Century' made waves, he had raised the issue of India's inequality being 'hidden' because of lack of income and commodity-wise tax data. This dataset was published in May 2016 after the public pressure following the publication of his book. I am not sure if it is possible to discern those who evade tax from this data as it only contains 'effective assesses' under different PAN categories like individual, firm, company, etc. Nikhil's point about 'tax revenue foregone'. There is a statement published every year along with the Union Budget called 'Statement of Revenue Impact of Tax Incentives under the Central Tax System' which is where P. Sainath gets his data from. In fact, when he quotes the total figure from this statement and calls this 'corporate subsidy', it is factually incorrect because there are several categories mentioned under tax exemptions, many of which benefit small and medium enterprises in hilly terrains, conflict-ridden regions, and also drought prone areas, etc which make economic sense. It is another matter that some of the clauses are used for tax evasion. But as of now, there aren't many analyses that differentiate between the effective and ineffective tax exemptions. Ideally, an outcome budget should be published the Ministry of Finance according to which ineffective tax exemptions should be removed. But as of now, in spite of several government reports and also mentions in the Union Budget itself of tax exemptions causing leakages, the practice continues. -- Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
