I-T returns to have pre-filled mutual fund gains information?

NEW DELHI: From next year, you may not have to fret about calculating the capital gains tax liability while filing tax returns.
The revenue department is in talks with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to work out a mechanism under which the long-term and short-term capital gains on mutual funds and shares can be worked out helping millions of retail investors file returns on their own instead of having to approach chartered accountants to do the calculation.Some other items such as dividend income may also be included, senior officials said.
Similarly, the government is looking to include the interest earned across bank accounts into the pre-filled forms instead of confining it to the bank account that is mentioned by taxpayers to get a refund. With banks getting Aadhaar number of most taxpayers and the Unique ID also linked to PAN, the government believes that the architecture is in place to ease the compliance burden on individuals, many of whom need to rush to bank branches to update their passbooks for calculating the interest income.

“Once this happens, it will truly turn tax compliance running on technology and ultimately bring in ease, efficiency and transparency, benefitting both taxpayers as well tax authorities,” said Kuldip Kumar, leader and partner — personal taxes at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As part of its efforts to simplify the tax filing system, the government has introduced pre-filled tax return forms, which it believes has now stabilised although several taxpayers had concerns about the forms earlier.
Starting this year, ITR-1 is coming pre-filled with your salary details, interest earned from fixed deposits and details of tax deducted at source. Earlier, these details were required to be manually entered by individuals. But for a large number of other taxpayers, the details are currently not coming in pre-filled format.
Over a period of time, the scope of these forms is to be expanded as the government also gets more data on taxpayers.

So far, the government has been using technology for monitoring compliance and checking leakages. “Providing pre-filled return forms with such a detailed information will really help taxpayers to simply confirm and file the returns quickly, where there is no discrepancy. However, where such pre-filled details are incorrect, changes may be made before filing the returns,” said PwC’s Kumar.