I-T department taps UIDAI for biometric PAN cards

The income tax department is reported to have tied up with Aadhaar (the new avatar of the Unique Identification Authority of India), for issue of biometric PAN cards.

The biometric PAN cards, which will be issued after collection of prints of all ten fingers, iris and face of the assessee, as proposed by the UIDAI for the issue of UID numbers, will help to weed out the menace of duplicate PAN cards.

The income tax department had, earlier, put on hold the proposal to issue biometric PAN cards to avoid duplication with the UID numbers.
    
The proposal then was to include fingerprints (two from each hand) and the face of the assessee in the biometric PAN card. Such a card, it was hoped, would be difficult to duplicate or manipulate.
    
However, the finance ministry had put on hold the biometric PAN card project till the UID was set up last year.

The Aadhaar (UID) number is expected to roll out by February 2011 and finance ministry officials hope the mandatory use of the UID for the issue of PAN cards in the future would help curb the proliferation of duplicate PAN cards.

In fact, the then finance minister P Chidambaram had, in 2006, proposed biometric PAN cards to counter the problem of duplicate PAN cards.