New Delhi, Feb. 17 -- While India's new Income Tax Bill broadly deserves praise for attempting to simplify the law, one provision could ruffle feathers. It makes it a must for an assessee to share computer access codes during search and seizure operations and gives taxmen authority to access the taxpayer's "virtual digital space."

This is reportedly envisaged as a broad term, including email, online trading as well as investment accounts and cloud servers. To be sure, authorities are known to do this anyway, demanding such access from assessees under scrutiny.

It was contentious because the law doesn't provide explicit backing for it. The new bill makes it explicitly legal by putting it in black and white. This, however, could take us d...