Yet another survey conducted by the Income Tax (IT) Departmental Sub-Registrar Offices 1 and 2, namely Collector Office Compound, Civil Lines and Reshimbagh, on Thursday, uncovered over Rs 1500 crore worth of under reported property transaction data in Civil Lines and Rs 70 crore at Reshimbagh. The finding points to continuing irregularities in property registration and financial reporting across Nagpur. The survey is being carried out by Intelligence and Criminal Investigation Wing (ICIW) of IT. IT Department is concentrating on property market as it sees massive under reporting of transactions, hinting at suppression of income by buyers. Already, a dozen Sub-Registrar offices have come under scrutiny.

 

The preliminary outcome at Civil Lines office seems to be biggest under reporting till date. The arrival of IT sleuths in early morning hours put the officers in tight spot. The officials carefully went through the property registration and compared the value reported in the officials record with prevailing market prices which showed massive mismatch. The fresh survey comes close on the heels of the Khamla office incident, where Assistant Deputy Registrar (Class-II) A T Kaple was suspended following a surprise inspection by Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule. During the inspection, Rs 5,000 in cash was found in Kaple’s drawer, and a preliminary inquiry confirmed irregularities and misconduct. This led to his suspension.

 

The case followed several citizen complaints alleging unauthorised payments through middlemen for registration services. IT has conducted spree of surveys at multiple sub-registrar offices in Nagpur District, including Hingna, Sadar, Mhalgi Nagar, Mahal, and many others. Together, these inspections have uncovered thousands of crores worth of under reported property transactions. Earlier, the IT Department’s ICIW had uncovered property tax evasion exceeding Rs 800 crore at the Hingna Sub-Registrar Office alone. The two-day survey revealed large-scale suppression of high-value property transactions that were not reported under the mandatory Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT) framework. That investigation exposed a modus operandi in which officials manually filtered out certain high-value transactions from iSarita, Maharashtra’s official property registration portal, before uploading data to the Income Tax Department’s SFT portal. By selectively omitting entries exceeding Rs 30 lakh, officials avoided detection by the department’s automated monitoring system. The findings at Hingna have since become the template for further inspections across Nagpur’s Sub-Registrar network.