NEW DELHI, August: The Central Board of Direct Taxes has accorded approval to a project for computerization of the Tax Department, says a report from the Fiscal and Financial Resources Informatics Division, NIC. The National Informatics Centre has been working with the Income Tax Department, mainly with the Central Board of Direct Taxes at Delhi, for the last few years. At the instance of the then Revenue Secretary a quick systems study for computerization in the Income Tax Department at Bombay and Delhi was completed in June, 1991. With 24 Commissioners of Income Tax (CITs) in these two Cities, they account for nearly 50 per cent of the Country's direct taxes. The approach proposed by NIC consists of providing large computer systems in the Cities for challan processing with comparatively smaller systems located in each CIT. Sufficient number of terminals would be provided in the CITs to cater to the workload. These systems will be appropriately networked. Subsequently, NIC was asked to conduct a detailed feasibility study for these two Cities. This was completed by NIC jointly with the officers and staff nominated by the Central Board of Direct Taxes sometime in January, 1992. NIC made a detailed presentation of the findings of the study to the Board. Two one-day training programmes were then organized by NIC to acquaint the Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners respectively with the proposed scheme of computerization, and also to demonstrate to them the working of the software package in its initial form. These training programmes were attended by over 60 officials. The project is now awaiting formal financial approval from the Ministry of Finance, added the report.