New Delhi, Oct 28 (IANS): Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday launched the 'e-Sahyog' pilot project of income tax department which aims to reduce the need for the taxpayer to physically appear before tax authorities, an official statement said.

"The 'e-Sahyog' project launched on a pilot basis is aimed at reducing compliance cost, especially for small taxpayers. The objective of the project is to provide an online mechanism to resolve mismatches in income tax returns of those assesses whose returns have been selected for scrutiny, without visiting the income tax office," said a finance ministry statement.

Under this initiative, the department will provide an end to end e-service using SMS, e-mails to inform the tax assesses of the mismatch.

"The taxpayers will simply need to visit the e-filing portal and log in with their user ID and password to view mismatch related information and submit online response on the issue," it said.

"The responses submitted online by the taxpayers will be processed and if the response and other information are found satisfactory as per automated closure rules, the issue will be treated as closed. The taxpayers can check the updated status by logging in to the e-filing portal," the statement added.

The finance minister also inaugurated a drive to provide public service at peoples' door step by holding special PAN camps in remote areas.

Under this campaign, special PAN camps will be held over two days at 43 remote, semi urban and rural locations across India in the first instance to facilitate obtaining of PAN card by persons residing in such areas.

Jaitley also interacted with applicants and officials at seven of these camps through a video conference.