Tax problems for producers of TFI!

Telugu Film Industry has been blessed with many big successes over the time and box office numbers have been growing exponentially over the years with the expansion of the market in Overseas and domestically as well. With new movies bringing audience to theatres in the first two weeks in large numbers, producers plan to make their money by selling movie distribution rights at big amounts showing the previous hit movie returns. Due to lack of proper tracking, some times the exhibitors tend to underreport and some enthusiastic producers bloat their figures second to none.This has become the norm these days and suddenly after Demonetization, the income tax officials have become more alert to this trend and started putting

This has become the norm these days and suddenly after Demonetization, the income tax officials have become more alert to this trend and started putting check on any producer who claims to have received heavy returns on his movie and look at the TDS payments they have done. Due to this the successful film producers stopped announcing official figures of their movies except for Khaidi No 150, where Allu Aravind wanted to share the excitement of return of Megastar Chiranjeevi to box office in a grand way. But he is not the producer of the movie. Dil Raju who saw back to back successes with Shatamanam Bhavathi and Nenu Local is also mum on the total collections of his movies. The products of Gautamiputra Satakarni claimed huge profits before release and Income tax officials raided on their offices to check the authenticity of money trail.

With this new trend, only few box office trackers have been updating numbers constantly but no official figure like before is being issued by the producers any more. Suresh Babu about the trend said, “Producers would get afraid of these raids as they leave a wrong impression about them in the market and raids are about TDS payments and nothing much.” He went on to add, ” If the ticket sales have been digitised even at the small stations, then no body would have to fear how much they have collected and underreporting and bloated figures will diminish too. We are waiting for a Government Order in this matter.” Well, hopefully such measures will bring the negative reporting down and make the collection tracking as transparent as possible.