Calcutta, Jan. 9: The income-tax department has collected almost 69 per cent of the 2017-18 target of Rs 41,891 crore set for West Bengal and Sikkim, its top tax officer for the two states said.

K.L. Maheshwari, the principal chief commissioner of income-tax for West Bengal & Sikkim, said that at this time of the year in 2017, collections had been Rs 25,500 crore against a target for 2016-17 of Rs 35,500 crore.

"As on date we have collected nearly Rs 29,000 crore," Maheshwari said. “Tax collections have gone up by around 13 per cent this year and we can achieve the target.”

The Bengal-Sikkim circle has one cause for worry: a decline in the share of TDS or tax deductions at source in overall collections.

As Seema Khorana Patra, the CCIT for TDS, pointed out, banks have been centralising the TAN or tax deduction and collection account number that is allotted to all those responsible for deducting tax at source or collecting tax at source.

And this centralisation is happening in Mumbai.

Maheshwari said this is just an inter-departmental transfer, and not a loss to overall revenues at the national level.

To offset this, the income tax department here is trying to get new assesses here, Maheshwari said.

“We will try to achieve the target by monitoring the TDS payment, by monitoring the advance tax, by monitoring the regular assessments,” Maheshwari said.

"Whatever loss was there because of the migration of the TAN numbers will be offset by higher collections," he said.

Earlier, he and his fellow officers had urged a gathering of the city’s top tax advocates and practitioners to get their clients to pay up whatever is legally due. They were speaking at the release of Income Tax Pleading and Practice, a book by Narayan Jain and Dilip Loyalka.