Income Tax – Extension of Due Date for filing Returns - Perils of being first and fast!
WE, in TIOL, used to take pride in our ability to bring you the news as it happens at the speed of light. But the last two days, we were confronted with anxious Chartered Accountants from all over the Country, worried whether our news about the extension of due dates for filing Income Tax Returns to 15 October was correct.
We carried the news in the afternoon of 27.09.2010 and immediately we were flooded with calls from CAs from all parts of the country. By that time we were the only one to carry this news and it was available only in our site. One CA doubted our news because, no other site had carried the news. I told him to wait for half an hour and many sites would carry it – there are many newsy sites in the country who simply watch our site and carry our news immediately after we carry any news. And sure enough a couple of sites had CARRIED the news after we did.
But the Chartered Accountants were still worried.
A CA from Pune said he doubted our news because the Jammu extension and this one has the same File Number!
An enterprising socially conscious CA sent mails to his colleagues all over the country asking them not to believe the TIOL news as it may be a hoax. That brought in more phone calls from more worried CAs.
A CA friend who has a lot of respect for TIOL, closed his office early after seeing our news, but yesterday morning he told me that he could not sleep as he was disturbed by his friends about the hoax news.
Yesterday morning I was woken up by a call from another CA friend, who asked me whether our news was correct. I lost my cool and asked him whether he has ever seen wrong news published in our site in the last ten years. He understood and said, “you must have been getting too many calls – our CAs are truly worried."
Yesterday afternoon, the CA Institute carried the order and that brought some order among the CA fraternity and by evening the CBDT and PIB had published the news and the CAs started believing us!
Does the extension really help? A CA told me, “even if they extend it by a hundred years, all returns will not be filed. The extension should have come on 29 th or 30 th so that maximum returns would have been filed. Now there is a lull and momentum will pick up only from 10 th October."
We assure all our Netizens that while 'speed' is our USP, we give equal importance to accuracy and authenticity.