Tedious TDS
IN the tax administration, the Government wants you to do most of the work the tax officials are supposed to do and if you make a small mistake, they will show you hell. An entrepreneur wonders, "instead of being grateful to me for doing their work free, why do they treat me like a criminal?"
Recently a High Court summarised the tasks to be performed by deductors in relation to TDS provisions:
(a) Ascertain from its books of account as to which payments/expenses are covered under TDS provisions.
(b) Check up monthly record for applying the TDS provisions when payments exceed certain threshold limits mentioned in the Act.
(c) Collect PAN details from the deductee which normally are either verbally spoken by the deductee or sent by message/copy of PAN Card. Deductee does not have any mechanism to easily check the correctness of the PAN verbally spoken/received by message.
(d) deduct the TDS/TCS at the applicable rates by the end of the month.
(e) deposit the collected TDS normally within 7 days of the next month following the month in which tax has been deducted/collected.
(f) Collect various information at the end of the quarter for deductees of whom tax has been deducted/tax deducted at lower rate/no tax deducted for certain categories of deductees mentioned in the provisions of the Act.
(g) Furnish separate quarterly statement for salary, non-salary and tax collected at source.
(g) Furnish the forms manually/electronically in the way provided by Centralized Processing Cell TDS which gets some changes regularly due to advancement in technology.