Almost six months after the income-tax department outsourced the work of issuing Permanent Account Numbers to UTI Investor Services Ltd applicants still have to wait for more than a month to receive their cards.

UTIISL officials claim that November has seen improved efficiency. However, the income-tax department says it will monitor the situation before deciding on reducing the waiting period -- the time between the submission of a correct application form and the receipt of the PAN -- to 10 days.

I-T dept to outsource PAN card allotment
Big rush for PAN cards

In July this year, the income-tax department had outsourced the activity to UTIISL in line with the recommendations of the Kelkar committee, which had said all non-core activities of the department should be given to outside agencies.

The public sector UTIISL had, in turn, appointed Bajaj Capital as its franchisee for the receipt of all PAN applications as Bajaj had a countrywide network of about 85 offices.

Parimal Ramaiya, associate vice-president (marketing), Bajaj Capital, said they currently receive more than 4,000 applications a day, with offices at business districts like Delhi's Connaught Place logging more than 300 applications a day.

Ramaiya said the time lag for sending all completed forms to UTIISL is 2-3 working days as outstation applications had to be sent to metro offices through couriers.

He added that their workload had peaked in the end of September, when the deadline for filing of income-tax returns by individual assesses was about to expire.

UTI officials said they double check all applications for errors and then send them to the Mumbai office, which is responsible for issuing the cards.

They claimed that there was just a day's lag involved in the process. All UTIISL offices across the country have outsourced the scanning job to different agencies.

The non-cooperation by a certain section of income-tax employees has meant that there are no counters in income-tax offices across the country for receiving such applications.

However, UTI asks the tax department to issue PAN numbers against the completed application forms.