CBDT Launches Nationwide Verification Drive Against Suspicious Foreign Remittances and Form 15CB/Form 146 Certifications
The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), functioning under the Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, initiated a comprehensive nationwide verification exercise on 18th August 2026, targeting entities suspected of routing large sums of foreign exchange through remittances that appear inconsistent with their declared financial profiles. The exercise also places significant scrutiny on the professionals responsible for certifying such remittances through Form 15CB and its successor Form 146.
Background: How the Suspicious Remittances Were Identified
The Income Tax Department's investigative machinery, combining ground-level intelligence with systematic data analytics on outward foreign remittance flows, flagged a network of entities that had collectively remitted substantial foreign exchange over a period of approximately three years preceding the exercise.
What made these entities particularly suspicious was the stark mismatch between their declared financial positions and their actual remittance activity:
- Several of the identified entities were non-filers — meaning they had not submitted income tax returns at all during the relevant period.
- Others had filed returns but declared extremely low turnovers that bore no rational relationship to the scale of foreign exchange being remitted abroad.
- The stated purposes behind these remittances included:
- Payment of freight charges
- Import of software
- Import of consulting services
Despite these ostensibly legitimate purposes, neither the declared turnovers nor the overall financial profiles of these entities were consistent with transactions of such magnitude. Ground-level field verification added another dimension of concern — a substantial number of these entities were found to be not operating from their declared registered addresses, raising the spectre of shell entity operations designed specifically to move money offshore while maintaining a paper trail of legitimacy.
The Charitable Trust Connection: How the Network Was Uncovered
A nationwide network of entities engaged in remitting funds abroad was uncovered during a search operation conducted on a group of fictitious charitable trusts involved in providing accommodation entries against bogus donations/contributions.
This detail from the CBDT's press release is particularly significant. It reveals that the broader investigation did not originate exclusively from routine data mining of foreign remittance records. Rather, it was a search operation on fictitious charitable trusts — entities allegedly being used to provide accommodation entries against bogus donations and contributions — that first exposed the network of remitting entities.
This connection between sham charitable trust structures and large-scale suspicious outward foreign remittances suggests a multi-layered financial arrangement, wherein domestic tax avoidance mechanisms (bogus donation entries) and cross-border fund movements may have been operating in a coordinated fashion.