CAduniya.com : CA India Blog

The month of July is associated with the time for filing returns of income by individual taxpayers. The government has recently notified new forms for filing income tax returns. These forms replace the old ones. Any person planning to file her return for the year ended 31 March 2007 (relevant to income tax assessment year 2007-08) will have to use the new forms (see Ready Reckoner).

All the new return forms have a common prefix - ITR. Although the amendment in the Income Tax Rules, 1962 mentions that the new forms apply for the assessment year 2007-08 and subsequent years, the notes at the end of the new forms say that the forms are applicable only for assessment year 2007-08.

Perhaps, the government may change the forms yet again. The new forms are now mandatory for assessment year 2007-08. Old forms can be used for earlier assessment years.

Finance minister P. Chidambaram believes that the return forms in India are the simplest in the world. But does that make our tax returns simple? Old saral was a simple one-page form while the new forms - eight in number - are between two and 20 pages. This excludes the long list of instructions attached to each of these.Taxpayer and trigger scrutiny assessment. Some observations on the forms:

The process is simple for only a small segment of taxpayers deriving income only from salary and interest - they need to fill the simplest of the lot, form ITR-1.

The old saral was more like a summary sheet, wherein the taxpayers had to give their income information through one-liners. Now, taxpayers need to read the instructions carefully as they are required to fill small details, which were annexed earlier.

Via / Link

HYDERABAD/NEW DELHI: The idea of an exit tax on graduates from India’s highly subsidised institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management is back on the horizon, with the parliamentary standing committee on human resource development suggesting it.

The logic is simple — the exchequer subsidises these students who then go on to earn substantial sums by working for multinationals abroad and the Indian exchequer gets very little for its investment.

The concept of taxing graduates is not new. The UR Rao Committee, set up in 2003 by the NDA government to look into the workings of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), had suggested that the industry which employees these students should pay a cess.

The cess would help the government recover the cost of subsidising these students. The committee’s report was submitted to the then HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi. Follow-up action on the committee’s recommendation could not be taken as the NDA government was voted out.

Source: ET

The ITD has issued the ITR 1 to 4 on the net to be filled and got printed. But why there is so much delay in other forms? whether the ITD waiting the last few days in due dates i.e near October? Is it not an extra burden on the assessees and their consultants to fill the forms by hand only?