The Income Tax Department has detected unaccounted income exceeding Rs. 150 crore in search and seizure operations carried out against two Tamil Nadu business groups with premises in Madurai and Chennai, according to information provided by the finance ministry today.

Unaccounted cash exceeding Rs. 14 crore and unaccounted gold and jewellery valued at over Rs. 10 crore have also been seized during the course of the search action, the official statement said.

While one of the groups is engaged in the real estate business, the other undertakes contracts related to road and railway construction.

The search and seizure operations were carried out by the Income Tax Department on July 7 across more than 30 premises located in and around Madurai and Chennai, the official statement said.

As a result of search action on these groups, a large amount of incriminating evidence including documents and digital data have been seized.

In the case of the group involved in the real estate business, the evidence reveals large scale tax evasion by accepting huge unaccounted cash by way of “on-money” from buyers. The group was using software to maintain a parallel set of books of such unaccounted cash transactions.

In the case of the other group involved in the business of construction contracts, it has been found that the group was involved in large scale tax evasion by debiting bogus sub-contract expenses and inflation of purchases of various raw materials through self-made vouchers. In the modus-operandi followed by the group, the contract amounts were paid to bogus sub-contractors through banking channels, and after withdrawal, the cash was returned to the assessee group.

Further investigations are still in progress.