Income Tax Enabled Apartheid

[ITR = Income Tax Return] [TDS= Tax Deducted at Source] 15th July'2011: The 31st July is the last date to submit Income Tax Return for FY:201011.... , the finance man gave the circular which made all employees wake up and active for making the ITR preparation at it's peak. It's one of the most thankless activity to many employees including me. First of all many of us do not have clear idea whether it will be ITR-1 or ITR-2,3,4 or 5 because every year the norms & forms are changing. Gone are the days of Sahaj and Saral forms used to make the ITR easier. Normally every department has a few guys who has a knack for the finance related activities. I usually look out for those guys. Give them their due credit and they are ready to help me filling up my ITR form. They will ask a few innocuous papers like Bank interest certificate & Bank TDS, Short term gain , Income from house property and a big form-16 given by the finance guys. I browsed the incometaxindia.gov.in where in all the different types of ITR forms are available for download. I downloaded the ITR2 form which was a solid 4.8 MB huge excel file. Opening the file on my poor computer takes a huge time. But hang on, the site says I've to validate the 26AS form wherein the so far tax credited against my name is being shown. So I further did some click clack in my bank website and the 26AS was validated. They say that most of the data are available in the form-16 itself , true but the daunting excel file makes everything challenging. But we have more problem in store this year. This year our savings bank account was made corporate savings bank account as it brings more interest in the account but that has created more complications than ever. One day one of our finance savvy intelligent guy discovered that the interest calculations in these corporate savings account is faulty. Ever since he made the discovery the paltry bank manager was on the run. The bank says that they need some time to find out what went wrong. Therefore, we had to wait till 20th July when the branch manager himself came to our office with some of his sexy officers to declare that the error has been rectified and all the interest due ,have been credited to our accounts. Funny, but the discovery by the intelligent guy has made some of the interest payments double Im one among them. He deserves a party from my side but that comes after the ITR part gets over. So now after receiving the new TDS certificate from the bank we can now fiddle with the mammoth excel file. On my poor laptop the file takes huge time to open. Even from shifting one page to other page it behaves like a pregnant elephant on the run. Moreover every page, after filling in some data one

needs to validate it . Unless validated page by page one cannot complete the filling. Thy guy got bored and told me that he would do it on his powerful computer. I got a relief but immediately thought for those poor fraternity whose computers are not so powerful and who do not have a lucky chap to help. Perhaps the Income Tax department made the ITR filling so complicated only to help the road side accountant to make out a decent income helping you filling it. Instead of making it an excel file they could made it an xlsx file which opens only on later version of MSOFFICE. The Bill gates and company would be further delighted to sell out more MSOFFICE softwares, courtesy our great Income Tax department. So Alok came back after two hours with an ominous laugh, telling me that my ITR2 is ready. Now Ive to pay an additional tax of RS:9K. How come so huge amount ? Sir, it's all because the Bank has paid you a good amount of interest in your corporate savings account , was the immediate response from Alok. Is it ! OK then let me know where to pay it. Let's get this clumsy thing over & out . So accordingly as per his instruction I went to the site and proceeded for paying the self assessment tax whose invoice number need to be filled in somewhere in the daunting excel file. Before that I just tried to look into the file that Alok had filled in. It was a really appreciable job done by him. Picking up the data one by one and then filled in each cell , validating each page and then calculate tax etc etc. He deserves one more treat for this works ! There is a funny named sheet HYLA-BFLA (reminds me Humpty-Dumpty of my nursery days...) A friendly color 'help' button is there in each sheet. I pressed it to see what happens , but it brings me to the 'instructions' sheet instead, where I totally got lost because I could not recall where from I started my bon-voyage of this awesome 14 sheets ITR2 file and the pretty colorful looking instructions sheet does not have any 'previous' button. However, for all other sheets there is a 'next' and 'previous' button to trace back your journey along this daunting excel file. Perhaps the designer of this file had thought that 'seeking help' would be sought only at the beginning not after starting the dirty job. As the 'help' is not so helping at all in here. Now comes the acknowledgment part of the ITR2. For that my friend Alok has another file which he made ready for use. So I completed it and then send our office boy for depositing it. Next day after morning meeting while going through the corridor I overheard an uproar, people were grudging against Income Tax department as the IT department is accepting only the red colored acknowledgment form ! How come ! Mine was the black & white print out. I called upon Alok for an explanation.

He says , ' It's for the ITR1 forms not the ITR2 forms, Sir' ' But why only ITR1 ? What are the colors of the other ITRs ?' 'I don't know sir ', Alok pleaded guilty fully for the entire Income Tax department. Perhaps unknowingly I had hit upon an IT enabled apartheid in this country. Oh ! the file I downloaded from the incometaxindia.gov.in site for ITR2 is named as 2011_ITR2_r9.xls it means the poor designer has already churned out 8 aborted revised issues of this file. Like a cat has 9 lives , this is the last vestige of life left in this 9th revised file to make all others' life miserable. 'Mera bharat mahan' S. Bera Powai.