BENGALURU: Officials of the Anti-corruption Bureau of the Central Bureau of Investigations, who are investigating the case of a fake Chartered Accountant who claimed Income-Tax returns fraudulently, said in the FIR that IT officials were in nexus with the kingpin of the scam.
On January 24, the Income-Tax Investigation Directorate of Bengaluru raided Nagesh Shastri, partner of SSK Associates, and found that he was involved in filing nearly 1,010 fraudulent returns for about 250 employees of different private companies over three years, to claim refunds to the tune of Rs 5 crore by submitting false information.
According to CBI officials, the processing of e-returns is outsourced to Infosys Technologies Ltd. which validates the returns in bulk and generate list of cases where refunds have to be approved. The assessing officers of the IT Department posted in Central Processing Cell (CPC) of the Income-Tax Department gave the approval for release of refunds to assesses through their bank accounts.
The officials of Infosys Technologies Ltd., who were entrusted with processing the returns and the I-T officials at CPC are suspected to have connived with Shastri in processing these revised returns based on false information/documents knowingly and issued I-T refunds to the tune of about Rs 5 crore.The investigations revealed that the amount was shared among Shastri, and unknown officials of the I-T and lnfosys Technologies Ltd., causing wrongful loss to the government exchequer.
WHO IS NAGESH SHASTRI?
Nagesh Sastri, posing himself as a Chartered Accountant (CA), has been assisting several private sector salaried employees based in the city to file income returns over the past few years.
He had clients from major MNCs in Bengaluru which includes
Infosys, Biocon and Wipro. He is into this fraudulent business since 2014-15
According to Income-Tax officials, Nagesh’s modus operandi was to file revised returns of salary cases, making false/inflated claim of loss from house property and claims refund fraudulently. He filed more than 1,000 returns with loss from house property, aggregating to loss claim of Rs 18 crore. The salaried employees are spread over 50 companies in Bengaluru