Is the income tax department on a raid overdrive during demonetisation?

This is a simple question really. A PIB press release on the 16th of December has claimed that there have been 586 'raids' between 8th November and 16th December. These raids sized about Rs 2900 crores. However, we donot have statistics for comparative periods in the pre-demonetisation period or the year before. So while there is no doubt that there has been seizure of the currency, it is unclear if the income tax department is operating a super optimal level. So devised a simpler to test this hypothesis.

I used google search to list all the cases listed by various newspapers during the period September 2016 (first 25 days) and compared it with December 2016 (first 25 days) and December 2015 (first 25 days). Note: This will not match with the official figures as these are raids reported by newspapers and not by the IT department. Secondly, newspapers sometimes tend to report more than one raid under each story which I have counted as a single link.

So here is the summary. When compared with December 2015, there has been a massive 41% jump in raids in December 2016 (Demonetisation period). However, when compared with September 2016, there has only been a 9% jump in Tax raids. This ties up somewhat with the data that shows a massive jump in Tax raids over 2015. However, the raids in December donot show a significant jump over the raids during the pre-demonetisation period in 2016. This suggests that while there may have been increased capacity of the Income Tax department between 2015 and 2016, no such increase may have happened between pre and post demonetisation.

It now needs to be seen how successful the IT department is in convictions going forward. Further, the next budget would be interesting as we would get an insight into how the Government plans to deal with Tax evasion at a more fundamental level viz Tax rates itself. In the meanwhile, we all wait in bated breath for December 31st.