Indian Revenue Service

This service deals with the matters concerning Income Tax. The members of this service, begin their career as Assistant Commissioners of Income Tax and may rise to the level of Chief Commissioners of Income Tax.

With changing times however, more and more IRS officers are serving in departments and areas that used to exclusively be the forte of IAS officers. This widening of opportunities and exposure has made the IRS more attractive.

Since there is no cadre system in this service you can expect to be posted anywhere in India nad even your home state, which becomes a problem for many in the IAS or IPS. The tenures are also more stable with an average of 3 years unlike the other two services where one may not even complete a month and the average tenure is around a year or so.

Officers of Indian Revenue Services (Income-tax) enter training at their academy at Nagpur. After training, they are posted as Assistant Commissioners either on assessment or other work.

While the main work of the department is assessment and recovery of direct taxes, the department has specialised branches dealing with investigation of tax evasion, statistics, and so on with the help of Assistant Directors (of the same rank as Assistant Commissioners of Income-tax). The Assistant Commissioners/ Deputy Directors, Communication Chief Commissioners become members of Central Board of Direct Taxes. The head of the department is the Chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, who is invariably a member of the Indian Revenue Services (Income-tax).

Top IRS officers to get fixed pay scale of Rs 80,000 per month

NEW DELHI: Top income tax sleuths will now get a fixed pay scale of Rs 80,000 per month on par with secretaries in the Union government and police chiefs.

The proposal, approving the enhanced salary for chief commissioners (CCs) and directors general (DGs) of income tax, was in-principle cleared by the Union Cabinet in May when it also put its stamp of approval on the much awaited cadre restructuring of the income tax department.

"The decision to upgrade the salaries of these senior ranking officers from Rs 67,000-79,000 to Rs 75,500-80,000 was made by the government on July 19 and it will come into force from today," a top Revenue department officer said.

This is the first time Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officers have been sanctioned the apex grade of salary and these I-T officers will now be getting equivalent pay on par with secretaries to the government and directors general of police, the officer said.

A total of 116 CCs and DGs of the tax department will get benefit of this decision who are tasked to collect revenue under the direct taxes category.

The government recently sanctioned a large-scale cadre restructuring of the I-T department and created 20,751 posts, in various ranks, in the I-T department.

According to the new blueprint of the I-T in this regard, the number of assessment units of the department would be “increased by 1,080 from 3,420 to 4,500 for strengthening the tax administration".

This step is expected to “bring additional revenue of Rs 25,756.04 crore per annum against an expenditure of Rs 449.71 crore per annum", the new blueprint says.“The primary objective of the strengthening/restructuring exercise (of the I-T department) is to improve the efficiency of the I-T department, maximise revenue collection and provide better services to the taxpayers, apart from improving career prospects of the employees," the blueprint, also called the vision document, says.