New Delhi, Feb 6 (IANS): The Indian Income Tax Department receives 15-25 lakh permanent account number (PAN) applications per week, Parliament was informed on Tuesday.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla said these applications take from a few hours to two weeks to process for allotting the assessee a PAN number. A physical PAN card or an e-PAN card is issued to the applicant thereafter.

"Presently, on an average, 15-25 lakh PAN applications are being received per week. The time taken for processing these applications and allotment of PAN generally ranges from few hours to two weeks," Shukla said.

As on January 28, 2018, a total of 20,73,434 applications were under process or pending for allotment of PAN and issuance of PAN card, the Minister said.

In this connection, the tax department's agreement with the concerned service providers includes a clause for levy of penalty in case of delay and the same is invoked in appropriate cases, he added.

In the work of allotting PANs, the Department is aided by two service providers -- NSDL e-Gov and UTIITSL -- which collect and process the applications, digitise the data and put these up to the Indian Income Tax Department for the final allotment.

Presenting the Union Budget 2018-19 in the Lok sabha last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that tax buoyancy and the taxation base in the country had gone up, while there had been a significant increase in direct tax collections during the ongoing fiscal following reform measures like demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

CBDT Chairman Sushil Chandra said on Tuesday in this regard that a large number of taxpayers have been brought into the net taking the total base to 8 crore.

Addressing a post-Budget seminar here organised by industry chamber Assocham, Chandra also said that no income tax official can pick up a case on his own discretion, while only 0.5 per cent of all cases are picked up for scrutiny by the Department.