Capacity building of officials for the new Income Tax Act 2025 and focus on revenue mobilisation and arrear demands are some of the key focus areas for the income tax department this fiscal.

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The Central Action Plan for the Central Board of Direct Taxes for 2026-27 has listed out key priorities for the department including comprehensive training programmes for its officials to make them well versed with the new law. The Income Tax Act, 2025 has come into effect from April 1 this year.

The department will accordingly hold training programmes on four themes for capacity building of officials. This includes domain training that would focus on provisions of the new law and sector-specific knowledge; functional training that would include procedures, systems, litigation management, and departmental processes; behavioural training to enhance ethics, communication, and taxpayer-centricity and digital training focussed on data analytics, artificial intelligence, and emerging technological tools.

With a focus on ensuring tax collections remain steady amidst the uncertain economic environment, the CBDT has also placed special focus on meeting Budget targets and arrears and current demands are collected.

For FY27, the CBDT has a direct tax target of Rs 26.97 lakh crore. Of this the mop-up from corporate tax is estimated at Rs 12.31 lakh crore, from income tax at Rs 13.92 lakh crore and from securities transaction tax at Rs 73,700 crore.

The department has also come out with a plan for improvement in direct tax collection this fiscal and has identified Rs 2.57 lakh crore of demands fully confirmed by the CIT (Appeals) in FY26. It has underlined that assessing officers must ensure that all possible efforts are made to collect outstanding demands that have been confirmed by CIT (Appeals), subject to stay that may have been granted by higher appellate fora.

The CBDT has further asked officials to place special emphasis on collecting arrear and current demand and take suitable measures against non-compliant taxpayers. It has said that special teams should be constituted to help identify Top 10,000 arrear entries. “Special efforts should be made to classify outstanding demand to arrive at the Collectible Demand entries with accuracy and sustained efforts for collection of the same,” it said.

Identification of collectible undisputed demand entries and prompt issuance of refunds to avoid interest payments that have negative impact on budget estimates are some of the other suggestions in the Central Action Plan.

Published on: May 13, 2026 3:41 PM IST