By Vipin Agnihotri
In an age of Internet, it’s quite surprising that not even a single individual return has been filed online in Lucknow. When The India Street contacted the Income Tax (I-T) department of Lucknow, this fact came into light. It is worth mentioning in this regard that there is a separate assessing officer in the department to look after the individual returns that have been filed online. The 'systems' division of the Lucknow Income Tax department that has a responsibility of handling the data on the same said it has not received any online return so far.
"At this moment of time, we have not come across any instance where an individual has filed the return through online facility”, pointed out one senior official on condition of anonymity.
In terms of statistic, there are around three lakh individual assesses in Lucknow. Generally speaking, this category of tax assesses consists of those who get income from salary, proprietorship and interest.
Interestingly, the version of the Income Tax department negates the claim of lawyers and chartered accountants. Plenty of people filed their returns with the assistance of these professionals this time. “At least five percent of individual returns have been filed electronically this time around,” pointed out Rahul Singhania, chartered accountant in Lucknow.
When asked to comment on official version, Rahul maintained that it is quite tough to give exact figures for individual returns. Whatever be the figures, one thing is for sure it does not portend well for the department, which has ambitious 'online' plans for the future.
According to government officials, people of Lucknow have limited knowledge about computers and they are not too familiar with the technology as well.
Online filing can be defined as the facility where returns can be submitted electronically from home, cybercafe or workplace. But, for that to happen one require a digital signature to authenticate the return form. The pivotal factor here is that large chunk of the assesses in Lucknow do not have digital signatures.
On the other hand, corporates and partnership firms (having income exceeding Rs 40 lakh) that 100 percent returns came online. This is because of the simple reason that online filing is mandatory for both the category.
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