CBDT Chief Mody Asked me to Drop ‘Sensitive’ Cases, Alleges Senior Tax Official

New Delhi: In what are being termed as “explosive” allegations against the country’s top tax officer, the chairman of the Central Board of Taxes (CBDT) Pramod Chandra Mody, a senior tax official has alleged that he asked her to drop “sensitive” cases, adding that he said he had “secured” his position after a “successful search” action against a key Opposition leader.

In a report published on Saturday in the Indian Express, the said tax officer, Alka Tyagi, said she had even sent a complaint in this regard to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on June 21, when she was Chief Commissioner of Income Tax (Unit 2) in Mumbai.

Two months after this complaint, Mody’s tenure was extended by a year by the Centre. On Thursday, Tyagi, a 1984 batch Indian Revenue Service Officer, who was due for a posting as Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, was moved out to the National Academy of Direct Taxes in Nagpur as Principal Director General of Income Tax (training).

Incidentally, Tyagi was handling cases against Mukesh Ambani in the black money case, former ICICI Bank chief Chanda Kochhar’s husband, Deepak’s case and of Jet Airways, as per a tweet by senior Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan.

Explosive! Top IT officer of Mumbai handling sensitive cases against Ambani, Kochar & Jet airways, exposes how the CBDT boss asked her to drop sensitive cases. He boasted of how he secured his position with Modi by handling search operations against Opp leader.

“Tyagi’s nine-page complaint, reviewed by The Indian Express, alleges “tremendous pressure” from Mody. An almost identical complaint has been sent by her to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Central Vigilance Commission and the Cabinet Secretary, sources confirmed,” the report said.

The allegations come in the backdrop of a recent break-in in Tyagi’s office in Aaykar Bhawan, Mumbai, about which she had submitted a written complaint to her senior, Principal Chief Commissioner S K Gupta.

As per reports, the break-in was discovered by the security staff in the morning when they found locked cupboards broken in and ransacked and several files and papers “lying in disarray.

In her allegations, cited in her June 21 complaint letter to Sitharaman, Tyagi said that “in the last week of April/early May 2019, Mody informed her that the proceedings initiated against the “sensitive assesses had to be dropped” and this work should be completed before the end of May 2019. The complaint reads: “This direction was shocking but it was conveyed repeatedly, despite the difficulty I expressed to him.”

According to the IE report, Tyagi claimed “tremendous pressure” from Mody to “close this file at any cost”.

She said Mody’s instructions were that “there should be no record maintained of the fact that he was in any manner, involved in this sensitive case (which Mody asked to close) even for consultations and that it should be ensured that nothing in this file should ever show his linkage, in any manner to this case”, the report said.

In her complaint letter, the senior tax official states that she had “never dreamt” of disclosing such professional details but was forced into doing so because of the “manipulative and unscrupulous” nature of Mody’s functioning, adding that the CBDT chairman also used to get complaints “manufactured” against officers who refused to “succumb to his demands”.