Problems for the Indian cricket board do not end with the alleged spot-fixing in the money-churning Indian Premier League (IPL) and the purported sham of an internal probe it conducted to give clean chits to co-owners of two IPL teams. It extends to pending income tax worth crores – in fact, over Rs 550 crore between 2006-07 and 2010-11 fiscal years, an RTI query has found.

On a day the supreme court hears the BCCI’s petition against a Bombay high court verdict that dubbed illegal the internal probe panel’s clean chits to Rajasthan Royals' co-owner Raj Kundra and Chennai Super Kings ‘team principal’ Gurunath Meiyappan, also son-in-law of former BCCI president N Srinivasan, it emerges that the cricket board owes the income-tax department Rs 550.41 crore. Significantly, this pending amount does not include the assessment years 2011-12 and 2012-13, when both the income assessed and the deficit tax collected could have been pretty steep considering India co-hosted the big-ticket cricket World Cup in 2011.

The revelations have come following a query filed by Delhi-based RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal.

The RTI response, dated July 30, came from the office of the assistant commissioner of income-tax in Churchgate, Mumbai, following a CIC verdict; revealing that the super-rich cricket board owes huge amounts to the government in way of pending income tax.

The RTI reply states that assessment proceedings are pending from 2011-12 fiscal onward. It says Rs 196.16 crore was to be recovered for the assessment year 2006-07, when tax demanded of BCCI was Rs 222.93 crore and tax collected was only Rs 26.77 crore.

(See attachment of the I-T department’s reply to Agrawal’s query under RTI law).

According to Agrawal, the income-tax department should immediately complete assessment proceedings against BCCI till date, including 2011-12 and 2012-13 as also decide all the board’s appeals against assessments and take “stringent action, including attachment of BCCI bank account/s (if necessary) to recover heavy tax-dues”.

The RTI activist also said the income-tax department should “initiate an inquiry to fix the responsibility of its erring personnel who left assessment proceedings pending against BCCI for too long”. The department should also put on its website a list of tax defaulters, stating the amount to be recovered as also effective steps to reduce tax arrears.

Significantly, several civic bodies, including those of Delhi and Bangalore, have decided to display the names of property tax defaulters, on major traffic intersections as part of their ‘naming and shaming’ policy to embarrass the defaulters.