A new PAN 2.0 project has been announced with much fanfare. What exactly is this?

We should not deny any government a bit of bragging rights or hype masala. But we must also be able to see the reality from hype and cut through marketing to see the meat of what something really is!

As always, ignore MSM coverage. It can be downright misleading, biased, sycophantic, knee-jerk opposition, completely wrong or some combination thereof. Most of our journalists are not tax experts in fact they are experts in only one thing - that is nothing.

The source of this article is the press release that you can find in the Press Information Bureau website

It is a project not a ready product

It is a project by CBDT - Central Board of direct taxes. Oddly enough or perhaps not surprising considering how our babus work, I searched the CBDT website and could find nothing. From what I can understand of that presser, it seems it is merely a merger of a few websites that deal with PAN and hyped up to be a lot more. I will be happy to stand corrected.

Other details from the presser

1. It says “streamline the process of issuing and managing PAN and TAN”. Not bad as objectives go, but then nothing revolutionary.
2. It also talks of “establishing PAN as a common identifier for all digital systems of specified Government agencies” - but doesn’t say which agencies and which other identifiers will be merged with this.
3. IT refers to 2023 Budget announcement re the common identifier. So it has taken about 2 years to come out with - another announcement!
4. There is NO news of when this project will complete and go live.
5. We have God knows how many identifies - across GST, DIN, PAN, TAN, TIN and many others. How many of these are going to be done away with? No idea.
6. It doesn’t even say PAN and TAN will merge, let alone all other acronyms and numbers.
7. A lot of hype buzzwords are repeated throughtout the presser without details - efficient, ecofriendly, enhance etc.

So let us not hold our breath or go overboard with hype.

We need much more!

I am not denying that ITO and CBDT have done a lot to make tax administration more friendly and less harassing. But there is a lot that needs to be done! Forms are too complex, there is too many IDs when we have Aadhar that should be universal. I do hope government will do real simplification, not just merge a few portals and call it success.