• Notification Date: 01-12-2022
• Notification No: N/A

Same PAN allotted to two persons, Delhi HC seeks Income Tax Department’s Response

The Delhi High Court has sought response of the Income Tax Department on a peculiar case on Tuesday. The department has been asked to respond immediately regarding a case in which a man has claimed that his Permanent Account Number (PAN) has also been allotted to some other individual. As the result, he is receiving notices from a bank for clearing credit card bills of that person who is using his PAN.  

The man, who owns the PAN originally, has sought directions to the authorities to rectify the defect of issuing two PAN cards with the same number to two different persons. He complained that he is being asked to repay a debt of Rs 2 lakh against the credit card which had not been issued to him. 

Justice Prathiba M Singh has issued notices to the Income-tax department. The notices seek immediate responses of the Department of Income Tax, Directorate of Income Tax (System), National Securities Depository Ltd, State Bank of India (SBI) and Credit Information Bureau India Ltd (CIBIL).  

The Delhi High Court has scheduled the matter for further hearing on April 21. The HC ensured that the bank would not take any coercive measures against the petitioner for not paying the loan amount taken against the credit card.   

Advocate Amit Verma, who is on the side of the petitioner, submitted to the HC that since the PAN card of his client has been issued to someone else, his credit scores were being negatively affected. 

The petitioner came to know about his PAN being duplicated by someone else on August 15, 2017, when he received an income tax notice for the filing of wrong ITR. Since that day, the petitioner approached the respondents several times for making the correction but no one responded. He also reached out directly to SBI to remove all his debts saying that he was not a credit card holder. The petitioner also sought direction to CIBIL to make correction in his credit score. He reported the CIBIL that his credit scores were being reduced while he was not the one at fault.   
The petitioner sought compensation for harassment and damage caused to his reputation.