The Finance Ministry has detected and deleted over 11 lakh duplicate permanent account numbers (PANs) till date, Minister of State for Finance S.S. Palanimanickam said on Friday.
"The department has identified the multiple PANs belonging to the same person through an automated computer system of the department. Till date 11,69,238 multiple PANs have been detected and deleted," said Palanimanickam in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.
As on March 31, there were over 12 crore PAN numbers in existence, the minister said. The number of income tax returns filed in the 2010-11 were close to 3.5 crore.