The taxman is snooping around for Indians behind foreign institutional investors (FPIs).

In a slew of unusual and probing questions, tax authorities have asked several offshore funds to spell out how they go about raising money, share of Indian investments in the fund pools, and details of top investors in a fund. At least a dozen FPIs have received notices over the past few weeks from the income-tax (I-T) department trying to extract information on who was running the funds and from where, two persons familiar with the queries told ET.

Resident Indians can only invest in FPIs whose exposure to India is less than 50% while total subscription by non-resident Indians (NRI) cannot exceed 50% of a fund corpus.