ITR Filing: People with high salary, equity, MF investments may face compatibility issues

After much delay due to the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Income tax returns (ITR) excel utilities of ITR-2 and ITR-3 have been uploaded on the Income Tax e-filing site. In addition to the Excel utility, the Java tool is also available on the site for ITR-2.

The utilities of ITR-1 (Sahaj) and ITR-4 (Sugam) were uploaded earlier, even with the due date of filing return of income date of filling has extended from July 31, 2020, to November 30, 2020, for the assessees whose income needn’t be audited.

ITR-1 or Sahaj is intended for resident people (other than Not Ordinarily Resident) having Income from Salaries, One House Property, Other Sources (Interest, etc.), and Agricultural Income up to Rs 5,000.

However, salaried taxpayers with a total income of more than Rs 50 lakh or an individual who is a director of a company or has invested in unlisted stocks cannot offer ITR-1. Even investors in listed stocks and/or equity-oriented mutual funds (MF), who have recovered their investment or have capital gains from the sale of properties, etc., cannot benefit from the ITR-1 offering.

Therefore, salaried assesses (without income from business or profession), who are not eligible to apply for the ITR-1, must submit the ITR-2.

Residents who qualify to file ITR-1 and ITR-4 can also take advantage of the online feature to complete and submit the income statement directly on the Income Tax e-filing site.

On the other hand, ITR-2 and ITR-3 can be entered using Excel or Java utilities. Since Excel comes with MS Office, which is widely used, most of the people prefer to use Excel tool over Java.

Although the Excel utility for ITR-2 and ITR-3 is now available on the electronic income tax filing site, there are some technical problems with the two models.

For example, if you open the Excel utility, you might be interrupted with this message: "Excel found unreadable content in" ITR2_2020_PR2.1.xlsm ". Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.”

If you click No, the utility will close, and if you click Yes, the utility will open, but after removing some parts.

Alerting the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on this issue, CBDT said: "User can use 2007 and earlier versions of MS Office. The tool supports the latest three versions (the same is published in the note and in downloads) ".

So along with the complex ITR-2 and ITR-3 models, testers now have to deal with the compatibility issue, and those with older versions may have to install an advanced version of MS Office to use the utilities.

"That would be annoying because a lot of people are using the 2007 version." "I think 20 to 25 percent of people will depend on government facilities and may have problems," said Karan Batra, founder, and CEO of CharteredClub.com.

"Most CAs use paid software, so it won't be a problem for them. However, some junior consultants and most people rely on government facilities and may have problems."

So if you need to ship ITR-2 or ITR-3, but have MS Office 2007 or earlier version, you need to pay to upgrade your software or pay a professional to provide the return.

In solving the compatibility problem, CBDT said: "We will try to find an alternative option."

Source: Financial Express

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