Finance Minister P Chidambaram today launched e-filing of income-tax returns through a website called incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in. E-filing is mandatory for corporates and optional for individuals. Trusts have been exempted. | |
| Corporates have time until October 31 to file the returns. Till today, the department had received 1,600 electronic returns from corporates. |
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| Two more, Tata Consultancy Services and Hero Honda filed their e-returns in the presence of the finance minister, taking the number to 1,602. |
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| Chidambaram said there was ample time for filing returns. "I am confident that corporates will file their e-returns by the due date," he said. |
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| Corporate taxpayers can file their income tax and fringe benefit tax (FBT) returns through Form No 1. If the e-return is without a digital signature, the taxpayer will have to file a paper return as well. |
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| Welcoming the move, TN Manoharan, president, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India said, "There may be some teething problems, say with small corporates, that may not be clued in for this. The October 31 deadline may be inadequate." He added there would be no adverse impact on professionals like CAs on this count. |
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| The tax department had last year received 3.76 lakh corporates tax returns. Corporates and trusts were exempt from filing electronically last year while it was optional for individuals. |
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| When asked why trusts had been exempted even this year, Chidambaram said, "Trusts, as opposed to corporates, are not likely to be familiar with e-filing and in several cases may not even have access to computers. Therefore trusts are the very last category where it will be made mandatory." |
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Chidambaram said the introduction of annual information returns had increased compliance and 67 per cent of transactions under the AIR reported this year were accompanied with permanent account numbers. "I am confident this will increase next year," he said.
| | | | All About Digital Signatures
The use of digital signatures is back in the limelight once again now that the central government has made e-filing of tax returns mandatory. However, "there's a lot of confusion among chartered accountants and lawyers on how to use this software," says Pavan Duggal, Supreme court lawyer and cyberlaw expert.
The circular specifically mentions the use of XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) schema for digital signatures. Since it's a four-day old circular, "we have still not been able to figure out what it exactly means," adds Duggal.
Besides, the acceptability of digital signatures is poor in India. Less than 40,000 digital signatures have been issued over the past six years. The cost of a digital signature varies from Rs 2,000-6,000 depending on the level of security individuals or companies demand.
Digital signatures became legally valid after the enactment of the Information Technology Act 2000 in India. They are issued by a Certifying Authority (CA), and the prominent among them are Safescrypt, Sify, GNFC, MTNL and TCS.
Digital signatures help secure data like messaging, online banking applications, online workflow applications and e-tendering. Digital certificates (signed using a digital signature) use the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI technology), which is a sophisticated, mathematically-proven method of encrypting and decrypting information.
Information can be decrypted (decoded) only when both a private key and a public key match each other. The certificate contains information about a user's identity (name, email address, the date the certificate was issued and the name of the Certifying Authority that issued it). It also contains the public key.
The private key is stored on the user's computer hard disk or on an external device such as a smart card. The user retains control of the private key, and it can only be used with the issued password. |
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