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Offline Process at the End of Online Tax Filing May be Eliminated this Year

There is one major problem while e-filing income-tax returns. At the end of online filing of income-tax, taxpayers need to take printout of ITR-V form, sign it, and they have to mail it to the I-T department’s Centralized Processing Centre (CPC) in Bangalore.

Last year, about 1.65 crore tax returns were filed online, but ITR-V forms of about 25 lakh people were not received by the CPC. Besides this, some people forget to send within the stipulated period of 120 days and in some cases, these forms get lost in the post.

The I-T commissioner of CPC said that law and I-T ministers are working on this issue and they are still not clear about the introduction of new system by June-July, when the bulk of individual filings happen.

In order to get details of identity of the person filing the form, I-T department mandates the physical signature. Whereas digital signature is optional, as it requires to pay some amount to obtain digital signature, that might not be affordable by everyone. So, I-T department is looking at the option of electronic signature, where the identity of the tax payer can be verified online, including PIN that is used to authenticate yourself.

The I-T commissioner of CPC said that there was 80% increase in online returns as it is found that 1.65 crore online returns filed last year when compared to 91 lakh filed in 2010-11.

Online filing resulted in faster processing and refunds and eliminated the bribes to obtain refunds. Moreover, the average processing time which used to be 2 years has come down to 151 days and again later it came down to 59 days, and now, further it is down to 40-50 days.