IT Dept. plans to stop manual sending of ITR V hard copy

Soon you will be relieved of sending the ITR V form by post to Bangalore. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the administrative authority of the income-tax department is proposing to introduce electronic verification of the returns submitted online.

The new procedure is expected to be applicable within this financial year, will save the taxpayer from the hassle of taking the print out and sending the paper document by post and tracking its acknowledgement. “The online submission of returns or E-filing was meant to make taxpaying easier for people. But compulsory dispatch of paper documents by post to the Bangalore-based central processing centre of the department was undoing this. Hence, the department has decided to end this soon,” a senior official said.

When returns are filed online, it required to send the ITR-V by ordinary post to the I-T department’s CPC, based in Bangalore. It then sends an electronic acknowledgement to the tax return filer. Often after submitting the returns online, the non access of the printer to take the print out of the ITR V generated as well as the trouble in manual dispatch of the document by post make the tax payer to postpone the activity and ultimately miss the dead line. The department had previously extended the deadline couple of times of the A.Y. 10-11, 11-12, 12-13 due to huge number of such failures (Read : Last date for filing ITR-V extended ). The department has been receiving a number of complaints from taxpayers with regard to following these rules and also was getting suggestions to do away with paper documents and make e-filing more user-friendly, he said.

During 2012-13, a 31% jump was seen in e-filings by taxpayers as 2.14 crore entities filed returns online as compared to 1.64 crore in 2011-12, which make the manual verification difficult.

Recently, the CBDT has made e-filing mandatory for those with an annual income of Rs 5 lakh or more from 10lakh for the financial year 2012-13 and assessment year 2013-14 and with the addition of this category of taxpayers the department expects a huge surge in the number of online filings.

The department also wants to introduce “new concept of third party validation of utilities developed for e-filing which will avoid mistakes in returns and bring uniformity in the interpretation of tax laws in filing of returns”.