Net-based aids for 'taxing' times

By Anand Parthasarathy

KOCHI JULY 22. The extended last date for income tax assessees - mainly salaried employees - to make their annual returns, is just one week away: July 31. But for those who have been too busy to make their calculations and dread the annual last minute hassle, the Internet may offer some aid and comfort this year.

A number of websites have come up within the last year which offer a variety of free online aids to tax calculation. For the first time, the Internet surfer is also offered services where - for a small fee - the return, once finalised is physically filed at the Income Tax office and the acknowledgement delivered at the doorstep: a boon for those who dread those snaking queues on the final days before the deadline.

The `Tax Corner' at www.myiris.com provides a wide spectrum of tax planning tools. The `Saral' form is available for download. The new feature this week is a long article by the well-known tax consultant, Mr. AN Shanbag, on `How to benefit from Budget 2001'.

The website, www.filemyreturns.com, is just that: a service where your returns are collected and filed on your behalf at the local IT offices and the acknowledgement delivered to you. The service is currently restricted to Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Pune, Delhi and its immediate surroundings: Faridabad, NOIDA, Ghaziabad and Gurgaon. The service costs Rs. 150 for Salary and ``Saral'' returns, Rs. 50 for PAN application and Rs. 500 for obtaining IT clearance.

A recent site is `timesofmoney.com', launched earlier this month by the Times of India media group, which has launched a financial service called Timesonline Money Ltd. in association with I-Flex and Citicorp Finance. The website has a large collection of tax, investment and savings-related tools and charges Rs. 300 to prepare and file salary/Saral returns; Rs. 600 for salary plus property returns and $25 for NRI returns. Since these are annual charges, they include some post return services like handling IT queries.

Another service for those who need someone to file their returns for them, is www.esaraltax.com. This is the only site that seems to encourage users to e-mail their details. The site promises to compute and fill in the appropriate tax form and courier it to the customer, who can then sign the return and attach any documents required. E-Saral will collect the completed form and file it - charging Rs. 500 for the total service.

The magazine Intelligent Investor (www.iinvestor.com) and India Today group's online news site The Newspaper Today (www.tnt.com) have both created substantial resources to help individual assessees compute and submit their returns. Other substantial tax related resources can be found at the website of Economic Times (www.indiatimes.com/et/tax or www.economictimes.com) and at the finance-commerce news portal www.indiainfoline.

Possibly the most comprehensive Indian Net-based service on tax matters is incometaxinfo.com, created by tax expert Mr. Narayan P. Jain and colleagues. The site was launched in November last by Indiaallinfo.com (which provides a link) and has developed into an awesome vertical portal on all tax matters, highlighting every new Rule or notification as soon as it is published. It carries a complete set of forms for download and includes a good search engine to find a specific notification or reference. The notes on all taxation aspects are footmarked with references to court decisions.

In contrast to these websites created substantially as a public service by private agencies, the official resources on IT are paltry - and in some cases misleadingly out of date. The main portal to access the Government resources, www.nic.in, provides a prominent link `Forms for filing IT returns'. This takes the surfer to the website of the Delhi IT circle (incometaxdelhi.nic.in) which provides the downloads in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format, which is available on most Indian PCs. While the list of forms available is more comprehensive than what is provided by the private websites, the `instruction' sheets that come with the form are almost all outdated. If you download the Form 2a that covers income for salaries up to Rs. 2 lakhs - the most widely used form - the annexures still provide rates and details for the previous assessment year 2000-2001. In some cases, these details have not been updated after 1998. A check at the NIC portal for websites of IT offices shows that only a few like Mumbai, Goa/Karnataka, Delhi, Kanpur and Gujarat maintain websites.

Indeed, the Internet site of the department that might be expected to offer the maximum information on taxation matters - The Central Board of Direct Taxes - is far and away the least useful of all the Indian websites offering some help with taxes. The site www.finmin.nic.in/cbdt consists of just three `buttons' on a plain screen dealing with `Rules for NRIs', PAN numbers and a description of the Samman awards for top tax payers. On the other hand, dozens of enterprising private operators are already offering Indian users a feel for doing their tax work online.

Some state that they are geared to send your returns, including scanned document enclosures, online to the IT department - as soon as the Government permits this.

To take the sting out of the coming week's tax agonies, one website has peppered its pages with telling quotes and jokes. One goes: ``I was told we should all pay our taxes with a smile. I tried that, but it doesn't work. The tax department wanted money - not the smile''.

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