The Income-Tax department has come up with a new hassle-free way to pay one’s income-tax online. Instead of filling up cumbersome physical forms, and standing in the long serpentine queues at the Adarshnagar office, all you need to do, is go to the specially designed website, fill in the details and click it away. As a senior IT official, in charge of salaried IT assessees in the city, says, “All one needs to have is a basic knowledge of Form 16, as given by the employer, and reproduce it in the eform available on the Net without errors.”

The IT department has launched a widespread campaign to popularise this efiling of returns. One needs to go to the website, incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in, and create a login. The PAN number is the default login ID, for which a password can be created by the user. Individual salaried taxpayers can download the ITR 1 (Sahaj) form, fill in all the details offline and upload the automatically created .xtml file. “It is hassle-free,” certifies K. Sridhar, a software professional with Motorola. “The process is finished within a minute,” agrees Giridhar Toshniwal, an auditor with PPKG & Co.
There is, however, an apprehension among taxpayers that the tax refund, if any, could be delayed in the eformat. “It took more than a year for me to receive my refund when I filed the e-returns two years ago. So I reverted to physical filing,” says Manoj, an employee of Hetero Drugs.
Another problem is that of digital signatures. Many of the assessees, filing their returns at Ayakar Bhavan, said that they did not have the same, so had to continue filing physical copies. “There are lot of apprehensions about efiling and the department needs to focus on clearing them,” says Ms Sandhya, an employee with St Ann’s College.
Clarifying this issue of digital signatures, an IT official said that those who do not have digital signatures can sign on the acknowledgement form, which is generated immediately after filing the returns and post the same to the IT office in Bengaluru, to the address mentioned in the receipt. However, he cautioned that eformat users, should check the 26 AS form available on the site, to verify whether their employer had deducted tax at source and remitted the same to the IT department. The figures mentioned in Form 16 and 26 AS need to tally with the ones uploaded, any discrepancy will lead to a delay. Employees who keep changing places, have also been advised to change their PAN details immediately on transfer, to avoid delay in processing the returns at the new place. About the delay in tax refunds, the official mentioned that the situation has changed since last year and majority of refunds were cleared by May.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

 
Top