No sir, tax corruption and tax terrorism are not the same.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said he will leave no stone unturned in making India the best investment destination in the world, a better place to do business..." Stirring words. But how? In 10 easy steps. On tax terrorism he said that the "Govt is aware of some black sheep in the tax department. Govt has compulsorily retired a number of tax officials, and will not tolerate this behaviour." Indeed, it did. The government forced "15 senior indirect tax officials from the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC)" to retire on charges of "corruption and improper conduct", after dismissing 12 senior income tax officers from service on charges of "corruption and professional misconduct". This was because the government thought that these people were collecting less taxes in exchange for bribes. 'Tax terrorism' means forcing honest taxpayers to pay extra money as a kind of ransom to avoid harassment. This is because "tax officials, driven by unrealistic targets set in the union budget, are under pressure to boost collections". "A Mumbai-based MNC, which is headquartered in the US, was asked to cough up 60% of the tax demand, and they did pay up fearing harassment," said a tax consultant. "Another pharmaceutical company was levied a tax demand of over Rs 70 crore. Sick of repeated calls from the taxman, the firm decided to pay up a portion of that demand." This is not legitimate tax owed to the government, but pure extortion. This year is going to be worse because the government has set a tax collection target of Rs 24.6 trillion, when there was a shortfall of Rs 1.7 trillion in 2018-19, despite resorting to thuggery, and there is a slump in consumer confidence which came in at 95.7 in July, down from 97.3 in June. When consumers lose confidence they stop spending, which is why sales of real estate, cars and consumer durables, such as refrigerators and televisions, are dropping. "Growth in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector has slumped in the last four quarters in a row since July-September 2018, both by value and volume, as consumers shifted to cheaper daily essential brands in the urban markets and rural growth slowed." Lower sales mean lower tax collections. Slowdown in growth is here to stay. "My feeling is that though they (government) claim it is 7 percent, if we can maintain 6.5 percent we will be lucky," said Chairman of Larsen and Toubro AM Naik. One of the reasons why founder of Cafe Coffee Day VG Siddhartha committed suicide was harassment by tax officials, to which they replied that they were protecting revenue, apart from making unproven allegations. Couple of days back a truck driver was beaten to death by toll collectors for not being able to pay 10 times the toll amount. Modi's concern is not being able to extract higher collections because of corruption while people are dying due to tax terrorism. He is conflating tax corruption with tax terrorism. Not on purpose, we hope.