New Delhi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday felicitated the Income Tax Department team which had made the highest ever seizure of cash in the country worth Rs 352 crore during a raid against a distillery group in Odisha last year.
At an event organised to mark the completion of 165 years of Income Tax in India, Sitharaman awarded the ‘CBDT Certificate of Excellence’ to the Income Tax team led by Principal Director of Income Tax Investigation S K Jha and Additional Director Gurpreet Singh in Bhubaneswar.
Singh, a 2010 batch Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer, played a key role in the raids at multiple premises of an Odisha-based distillery group on December 6 last year based on “actionable intelligence”.
That search operation of the Income Tax Department lasted for 10 days. During this period, a total of Rs 351.8 crore cash was recovered, which was described as the ‘largest seizure in a single operation by any agency’ in the country. Sitharaman also handed over certificates to two other members of that Income Tax team – Income Tax Deputy Director HK Das and Income Tax Inspector PK Singh. This award has been instituted for the first time by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the administrative body of the Income Tax Department. Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary was also present during the program organized at Vigyan Bhavan here.