Again, the data in isolation is impressive; but the payers’ perspective is equally compelling. Take for instance corporate tax returns where e-filing is mandatory. First of all, everybody is in favour of e-filing if it hastens speed and accuracy. Leading chartered accountants complain that the scheme was thrust upon them without adequate technical support and hand-holding. Even today, some of them are not confident of the accuracy of information provided, because the fields created in electronic return forms are ambiguous. They are worried that any mistakes that are discovered later will be blamed on the assessee rather than the system.

Secondly, there are definitely additional costs involved. Instead of attaching photocopies of paper documents, every tiny bit of information has to be electronically uploaded. Since companies issue hundreds of Tax Deduction at Source (TDS) certificates, they now have to feed all the data that was on these certificates into the system; this is time consuming since the information cannot be automatically uploaded. More frustrating is the number of times that the software rejects entries because the date or ward number is not entered in a standardised format. Some of these are teething troubles. But another problem with electronic TDS filing is that in reducing the challans from three to one, a person whose TDS is wrongly reported can suffer from wrong entries by banks and deducting entities.

Senior tax officials have themselves admitted that plenty of errors have already come to their notice. The biggest complaint, however, is that e-filing has not yet reduced paper work for the assesee. All original paper has to be filed and maintained in case the account comes up for a tax scrutiny. Consequently, e-filing has of returns involves extra work for the corporate tax payer at the moment, rather than a relief. This may change over a period of time when the system becomes more robust and glitches such as inaccurate entries by banks (which have already come to the notice of tax authorities) are ironed out.