ExpertDabbler

It is that time of the year again. Oh yeah, we are back to the season of filing tax returns. Please go through my earlier post last year around this time. As an addition, here are some hints/short-cuts to help your cause:

Registration for Efiling:
For starters, please go to the Income tax efiling website and register yourself if you are a new user.

Tips for registering:
Caveat, Your Name in your PAN CARD and your name in the Income-tax database need not match exactly. As a rule, the FIFTH CHARACTER in your PAN number should be the same as your starting alphabet of your last name. For e.g If your name is SENTHIL KUMAR MURUGESAN where MURUGESAN is your father’s name, then

if the 5th letter in your PAN is S, your last name in the Income-tax records is SENTHIL KUMAR.

You would need this detail sorted out before registering in the efiling website.

Paying taxes online:
You can pay your taxes online if you have a bank account. Select your appropriate challan (typically it should be ITNS-280 for individual salaried tax peyers). Select “(0021)INCOME-TAX (OTHER THAN COMPANIES)” under Type of taxes applicable.
Select appropriate TYPES OF PAYMENT (typically its 300 - SELF ASSESSEMENT, please check your case)

You can also check how your name appears in the income tax website by clicking on the online payment link, and by entering the mandatory fields.

Downloading and filling ITRs:
Download the appropriate form here in excel utility.

Tips for filling the ITRs:
ENABLE Macros. Only the green colored cells are input fields. RED labels are mandatory fields. Keep your Form-16 in hand.

If you have only salary income, use ITR-1.
If you have other sources of income, you might want to use ITR-2.
ITR-1 excel sheet is ‘relatively’ easier to use. You will know the true meaning of the word ‘relative’ when you use this :p

Note:
For ITR-2 users, its a huge task to find out SCHEDULE-S. We did informal user testing in our office :P.
SCHEDULE S is available in page 3 BELOW the area where you have signature/verification (row 78).

There is a bug in the ADDRESS FIELD in the INCOME FROM HOUSE PROPERTY Sheet in ITR-2. If the fields do not populate, chances are you might want to remove some information in your ‘Address of the property’ field. Please ensure the fields once entered gets populated elsewhere in the document. For e.g Amounts entered in the TDS sheet should auto-populate in the PART B sheets.

Please click on ‘validate’ button in each sheet to see if you are in the right direction.

Once you are done, please click the ‘Generate’ button to generate the XML file and upload the XML file into the efiling website.
You will be able to download a ITR-V document in PDF which requires a password to open. The password is nothing but a concatenation of PAN number in lowercase + your Date of Birth in DDMMYYYY format (no / or - in between).

Assuming you do not have a Digital signature certificate, Please take a print out, and send the same in ordinary post to the following address:

Income Tax Department ,
CPC, Post Bag No - 1,
Electronic City Post Office,
Bangalore - 560100, Karnataka BY ORDINARY POST ONLY
(no registered post, speed post, courier business) within thirty days after the date of transmitting the data electronically.

Hope this helps. Happy eFiling.

Please let me know if you have any difficulty.
I have done two filings in the last two years and have helped a few folks at work. Will be glad to help, if possible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 2:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.