[whowalrus]

I see a lot of commenters bring up privacy viz. tracking transactions and tax avoidance. Now I'm all for respecting people's privacy; but I also don't see why the govt. shouldn't be able to detect and extract what is legally owed to them.

Raghuram Rajan, the ex-RBI governor was in favor of tracking transaction data too (and wasn't in favor of demonetization), especially since he felt that the tax rate in India is already reasonable compared to other Industrial nations. [1]

So instead of ending the discussion at "It invades people's privacy, full stop", can we talk about ways of ensuring greater chance of collecting taxes? Maybe examples of how other countries have successfully tackled it?

[1] http://www.newindianexpress.com/business/2016/nov/10/the-cle...