Ranchi, Feb. 23: When income-tax officials “raided” around 500 professionals all over the country this week, not one of them happened to be in Bihar or Jharkhand.

While doctors have traditionally been the favourite target of the revenue department, the lawyers have been left alone “for reasons that are obvious”, said an I-T official on Friday.

The top 5 per cent of both doctors and the lawyers in the two states are known to be reluctant tax-payers despite having disproportionate income, claimed officials.

A lady doctor in Patna, for example, was found to have stashed currency notes worth lakhs in mattresses. An even more daring and possibly “bored” doctor at Ranchi, recall officials, was found to have “carelessly” stacked lakhs in his bedroom almirah.

Insecurity and poor law and order, however, have driven these professionals to stash money in bank lockers, some of which are obtained in the name of domestic helps and employees in nursing homes or law firms.

Both doctors and lawyers take resort to more conventional methods of tax-evasion as well. Inflating expenditure and the wages they pay to their assistants and employees is just one of them. Some of the money is also shown to have been returned by people who allegedly took them as loans a long time ago.

Then of course there is the time-tested method of explaining income and property as “gift” by anonymous donors and well-wishers.

But what has recently stumped the department is a relatively new exercise of investing in the shares of obscure “non-trading” companies listed in stock exchanges. They claim that an increasing number of politicians, bureaucrats and professionals are taking recourse to this method of evading taxes and converting their unaccounted funds from “black” into “white”.

The nexus between promoters of these companies, stock brokers and the tax-evaders have succeeded in hoodwinking the department till now, concede officials.

Officials explained that the tax evaders have been taking advantage of the rule under which income-tax is not realised on long-term capital gains — that is if shares are re-sold after at least one year of purchase. In such cases, the sellers have to shell out a paltry 0.25 to 0.50 per cent as security transaction tax.

What is involved is an elaborate sham by which chosen prices are pushed up and down. People buy the shares at nominal prices, say Rs 10, and “sell” the same shares at Rs 150 or more after a year.

Thus, the tax-evaders end up paying a nominal amount as transaction tax but in the process, turn their black money into legitimate white money.

Admitting that it is difficult to expose the nexus, I-T officials engaged in investigation and search operations, confided that the exercise has been in vogue for the past year and a half.

Confirming that lawyers are a holy cow for the department, officials claimed that in the last 40 years, not one lawyer has been raided in either Bihar or Jharkhand. A few raids in other states, they claimed, landed the department in protracted litigation.