UTI Investor Services will start issuing new permanent account number cards, priced at Rs 60 each, from June.

B Swarup, member (IT), the Central Board of Direct Taxes, said the cards would be issued to income-tax assesses within 10 days of receipt of the completed application forms from them. He said the entire process of issuing cards, including the card, was ISO-9000 compliant.

The move to ensure that all income-tax assesses in the country have PAN has become necessary with the department insisting that all tax deductions at source should quote PAN from this fiscal.

Swarup said the board had issued 58,74,623 PAN cards in 2002-03, which was double the 26,78,764 cards issued in the previous fiscal.

According to officials in the department, this was possible because they were able to process nearly 80 per cent of the returns, or 1.79 crore (17.9 million) returns, on computer. In 2001-02, only 15 lakh (1.5 million) returns were processed electronically.

As a result, the rate of issuance of refund vouchers has also climbed to almost 40 lakh (4 million). The total refunds issued by the department in 2002-03 was Rs 23,000 crore (Rs 230 billion), against Rs 17,000 crore (Rs 170 billion) issued in 2001-02.

The alpha-numeric PAN will be allotted by UTI Investor Services as per its agreement with the income-tax department.

Given the volume of transactions involved, the income-tax department found it difficult to handle the non-core business and, therefore, outsourced it to UTI Investor Services.

However, assesses already having a PAN allotment need not apply for a fresh one. It may be mentioned here that earlier PAN cards were issued free of cost.

The number of assesses in the country stood at 3.4 crore (34 million) on March 31, 2003, against 2.84 crore (28.4 million) in the same period of 2002, as per the latest figures released by the department.

The process of allotment of PAN to all assesses will also facilitate establishment of the nationwide tax-payer identification number, outlined in the Kelkar task force report on direct taxes.

Swarup said the setting up of the TIN network to do away with physical challans was similar to the process of dematerialisation of shares in the capital market.