The Intelligence and Criminal Investigation Wing (ICIW) of the Income Tax Department has intensified its crackdown on underreporting of property transactions across Vidarbha by extending its survey to two additional Sub-Registrar Offices, Yavatmal 1, Yavatmal 2, and Wani on Thursday. The move follows a series of over 20 surveys conducted in SROs across Akola, Mahal, Wardha, Hingna, Malkapur, Sadar, and Mhalginagar, among others. Sources confirmed that the cumulative value of underreported property transactions now exceeds Rs 6,500 crore. The initiative began at the Hingna SRO, where officials uncovered deliberate underreporting of property deals amounting to more than Rs 800 crore.

 

The patterns detected there became a blueprint for identifying similar lapses at other offices. Investigators found that high-value transactions were selectively omitted from Maharashtra’s official property registration portal, iSarita, while partial data was uploaded to the Income Tax Department’s Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT) portal. Under the Income Tax Act, all property transactions exceeding Rs 30 lakh must be reported annually through Form 61A (Part D) by May 31.

 

Despite having access to iSarita’s upgraded automated system, which allows SROs to generate a complete filtered list of transactions above Rs 30 lakh for submission to the SFT portal, Hingna officials manually curated entries, reporting only selected transactions. This selective reporting effectively bypassed the Department’s real-time monitoring system, which relies on PAN-linked data to track high-value financial activity. Sources said the evasion mechanism, based on manual filtering and partial disclosure, enabled numerous property buyers and sellers to avoid scrutiny for years.