The Income-Tax Department’s action against British Broadcasting Company (BBC) for tax evasion was based on definite material evidence, which the broadcaster acknowledges informally, but it is yet to follow the formal procedure for the same, two officials aware of the development said requesting anonymity.
The New Delhi office of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was "surveyed" by the IT department earlier this year. (Reuters)
In an email to the department, BBC has apparently confessed to underreporting of the detected income, which is as good as “tax evasion” and attracts recovery as well as penalty. BBC must take the formal route to comply by filing revised returns and paying all dues, penalty and interests, which runs in several crores, one of the officials cited above said.
According to a senior official, the UK government-funded broadcaster sent an email to CBDT confessing that it had underreported some ₹40 crore of income in its tax returns. “The email has no legal sanctity. The BBC needs to file a revised return for it to be taken seriously,” said a senior CBDT official.
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The other official said the law of the land is the same for all in the country and there is no special dispensation for either a media company or a foreign entity. “BBC must act as per the stated procedure or face the law. The Department will continue to take action against it until the matter is taken to the logical conclusion,” the official said.
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The other official said the law of the land is the same for all in the country and there is no special dispensation for either a media company or a foreign entity. “BBC must act as per the stated procedure or face the law. The Department will continue to take action against it until the matter is taken to the logical conclusion,” the official said.
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Initially, BBC tried to create an impression that the Income-Tax Department’s action was a vendetta by the government after the London-based broadcaster aired a controversial documentary on the Gujarat riots. “Now, they informally accept they were involved in deliberate tax evasion and the action was against their unscrupulous behaviour,” he said.
In mid-February, teams from the Income-Tax department were at the BBC office in New Delhi and Mumbai conducting “survey” for alleged tax evasion. HT reported it on February 14. While the taxmen were investigating the case of tax evasion, BBC had said that it was “fully cooperating” with the authorities and it hoped to have this situation resolved as soon as possible.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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Home/India News/BBC must file revised IT returns for underreporting ₹40 cr income: CBDT official
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