The Hindu : Kerala News : IT procedures made easy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jun 04, 2004

Kerala

Kerala

IT procedures made easy

By Our Special Correspondent

KOCHI, JUNE 3. The taxpayer-friendly Online Tax Accounting System (OLTAS), which demystifies tax payment procedures, became operative in the State on Tuesday, along with the rest of the country.

The OLTAS is yet another step towards the ultimate goal of the Income Tax Department to enable taxpayers to e-file their returns and help them pay their dues through the Internet, which could just be a couple of years away, senior officials said here today.

Taxpayers (income, wealth, corporation and other direct taxes) can now go to any of the 31 designated bank branches, or eight RBI centres, and pay their dues by filling a simple challan. The bank will return a stamped counterfoil with a unique challan identification number (CIN) which indicates the name and code of the bank, date of payment and serial number of the challan. Until now, the taxpayers had to go back to the bank for securing an acknowledgement three days after paying the tax. The CIN, which is proof of having paid the tax, should be quoted in the tax return while filing it at the end of the tax year. From now on, the taxpayers need not enclose copies of the challans along with their returns.

The OLTAS has reduced the challans to three from the present seven. Moreover, the taxpayer has to fill only a single copy of the tax challan instead of the four required until Monday. The challans, available with the IT offices, could also be downloaded from the department's site www.incometaxindia.gov.in. As soon as the money is paid, the bank transmits the information to an RBI facility in Nagpur which would in turn pass on the information to the Income Tax Department's central facility in New Delhi. In a matter of hours, the taxpayer's account is credited and the assessing officer can access the data on his computer terminal. Until now, the whole process took not less than six weeks.

Apart from being a huge convenience to the taxpayer, the OLTAS helps the Union Finance Minister to know how much money the Government has in its kitty. Thanks to the new IT-enabled tax accounting procedure, the Finance Minister can find the total tax receipts until up to three days before. Till now, he can find the outstanding only up to three months before. Also, the Income Tax Department could now monitor the tax receipts on a day-to-day basis. This would facilitate better finance management of the Government.

The new procedure is an upshot of the computerisation and modernisation of the tax collection and processing initiative started a few years ago.

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