This is a peak month for everyone who has not filed their income tax returns to the Income Tax Department. This month's end is the last date for individuals who submit their ITR with Form 16 and people who run businesses and own a company have a little more time to do so. I usually do this by myself and don't trust anyone else, even the auditors. I have explained why in one of the subheadings in this article.
For people new to ITR, it can be a little difficult to understand initially but there are so many materials available and the process has been made very simple in recent years. During the initial days, people used to get help from the other Third Party sites like Clear Tax and do this. But honestly, the ITR website has improved a lot and it is very convenient even for the newbies. Today I have filed my ITR. Taking more time and keeping the task for the last few days can be a bad idea because there will be huge traffic towards the end of the month and the website might struggle a little bit. Even now the website struggles a little bit at times.
Be careful while picking your auditors
There are two options where you can do this all by yourself by learning it or you can pick a reliable auditor and do this. We have to remember that this process is very important and the data we are sharing with third parties is sensitive. There have been cases where some auditors charge 10% of the money they get as a refund for the people for whom they are filing ITR. When they are doing this, they are greedy and claim a refund on the wrong categories. Usually, this happens for people who work in IT companies where they basically don't have an idea and are also lethargic to do this by themselves. They pick auditors like them and try to do this. The auditors claim a huge refund for the people and that way they can get a huge cut from that.
I have heard that these auditors who file ITR put amounts in fields like Interest from Electric vehicle purchase and special diseases categories and try to claim a lot of refunds. If the IT department checks this and sends an inquiry, they remove the money from those categories and submit it again. If the IT department doesn't care, they are lucky and they proceed with the refund. So, I would say that you should pick your auditors properly and be careful with whatever they are doing on your behalf.
More automated tracking required
In some of the sections, the automated fetching of details is excellent. This has been a feature in the last few years and it has been very useful for people who don't know much about their other income source. Similarly, it will be great if the details are fetched from other deductions like 80C or other categories automatically so that we don't have to specify that. For example, we have an exception of 10,000 on Savings Interest. There is no automated facility to apply that. We have to manually select the amount and apply them.
New Tax Regime
The government is promoting the new Tax Regime in my opinion. They are trying to add more perks to increase adoption. I believe this is a stress-free option because we don't have to show any additional bills for deductions and only the standard deduction will be applicable for us. This is in a way good for people who don't want to do too much of work for this ITR process. I believe this will be great and the idea would be to also reduce the number of fake bills prepared and submitted by people.
Great to have this simplified
This process is currently very good compared to the past. During my earlier days, it was not very easy to do this online because lots of information was Greek and Latin for many non-finance people. But now that we have all the information available online, we can easily fetch details and understand more. But even though things have simplified a lot, there is still a lot of room for improvement and it will be great to have this simplified even further.
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