Lottery agents will not be required to pay Tax Collection at Source (TCS) for the period October 2020 to March 2021, as per a decision of the income tax department. The said decision was taken after discussions between the income tax commissioner and the lottery director.

A certificate corresponding to Form 27BA of the income tax return, provided by the lottery agents for the financial year 2020–21, shall be certified by a chartered accountant and submitted to the lottery department.

The arrears will then be paid off after the certificate is sent to the income tax department. Earlier, the agents had been contacted by the income tax department to pay tax arrears for the year 2020, as reported by Mathrubhumi.

Agents who sold lottery tickets worth more than Rs 50 lakh between October 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, were required to pay the dues.

Meanwhile, it surfaced in Kerala recently that a three-digit gambling gang is reportedly operating throughout the state. Several reports of arrests relating to it have been reported too.

The police have detained 25-year-old Alisseripurai Shahal from Thiruvananthapuram along with Burudadari, the engineer who developed the smartphone software for online lottery gambling.

Ahmed Shafi, the gang’s commander, paid Burudadari Rs 1 lakh as payment for the software and continues to pay Shahal tens of thousands of rupees each month to maintain the application.

Even after the arrests, several other cases of three-digit lottery fraud are being reported from different areas. The fraudsters use the application to correctly predict last three digits of the winning lottery number and are guaranteed to win up to Rs 5000.

It has also been reported that there is another gang operating in Kottayam city which forges lottery tickets. The fraudsters print fake winning lotteries and present them to lottery agents with the objective to obtain the prize money. Visually impaired and elderly agents are targeted by these gangs.