Uneasy calm prevails between I-T officers and revenue department; 10 developments

Some of the demands of IRS officers

THERE has been an uneasy calm between the revenue department headed by an IAS officer and officers belonging to Indian Revenue Service-Income Tax (IRS-IT) after a delegation of IRS officers met finance minister Arun Jaitley last Saturday and resolved some of the issues including an agreement to direct its Mumbai-based colleagues to suspend a proposed strike. The recent problem began when a section of Income-Tax officers located in Mumbai adopted a resolution on July 22, 2016, questioning the interferences of the revenue department headed by IAS officer Hasmukh Adhia and even demanded abolition of the post of revenue secretary itself. Here are the 10 developments in the last two weeks:

“IAS wants to be a groom in every marriage function and a corpse in a death ceremony”, IRS officer P Satya Prasanth writes

INDIAN Revenue Service (IRS) officer P Satya Prasanth, who earlier had written a series of stories on the need to have parity between IAS and the rest of civil servants, has come out with a 9,000-plus-word piece: “India! Please Depute the Best Man to Deliver”. A Hyderabad-based deputy commissioner of income tax, Prasanth claims “IAS is an iron framework that has corroded”. (Disclaimer: BoI does not subscribe to most of the adjectives used for the IAS in the piece, though the writer has raised some valid points). BoI picks out 10 descriptions for the IAS, as being used by the IRS officer in the piece placed in his blog:

IAS Loses Out? Ex-IRS officer Kosaraju Veeraiah Chowdary tipped to be the next CVC

THE PM-headed panel that includes Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge selected the next Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), a post that has been lying vacant since September last year when the then CVC Pradeep Kumar had retired. And a former IRS officer Kosaraju Veeraiah Chowdary, the Income-Tax sleuth who played a critical role in probes like 2G spectrum allocation and the HSBC Geneva taxpayers list, is tipped to be the next CVC, according to…

Is DFFT scheme designed to send IAS officers alone for foreign training?

Harvard University Campus

HAS Domestic Funding of Foreign Training (DFFT) Scheme, launched by the government in 2001 to send Indian officers for foreign training, turned into a scheme to fund IAS officers alone? Armed with statistics, Hyderabad-based IRS officer Satya Prasant P in his blog has termed the scheme yet another unjust thing through which the IAS tries to maintain its hegemony over other services. Sample this:

Ex-IAS officer Sanjeev Sabhlok asks Arvind Kejriwal to stop “silly dramatics”

Sabhlok

A FORMER IAS officer Sanjeev Sabhlok has a piece of advice to Arvind Kejriwal, a bureaucrat-turned political activist who has been on an indefinite fast against “inflated” power bills. “Arvind should stop this silly dramatics and learn about good governance”, writes Sabhlok, a 1982 batch IAS officer who resigned from the elite service and moved to Australia. Here is Sabhlok’s main objection to Kejriwal’s venture:

IAS-IRS Tug-of-War: Readers' comments on Indian civil service reforms

HAVE a close look at this photo. Shot at an Income-Tax function held in a Delhi suburb just ahead of the B-day, finance minister P Chidambaram was flanked by two senior officers, revenue secretary Sumit Bose, IAS and CBDT chairperson Poonam Kishore Saxena, IRS. As someone says, a smile can cause boundaries to melt, hearts to warm up, and distances to reduce. BoI here presents some of the best viewpoints on its earlier post: “4,200 IRS officers, an IAS boss & half cooked platter of facts”...