New Income tax forms notified – Post offices to collect tax – but where is the notification?
In matters of incompetence, the CBDT is not an inch behind its counterpart the CBEC. The CBDT yesterday notified new forms for filing returns with immediate effect. The Boards which cook up late night notifications unfortunately have no means of communicating them to the public for whose benefit or bane, these notifications are manufactured. The CBDT web site depends on a private publication to upload notifications. The CBEC web site is a strict three hour a day five day week disciplined organisation which cannot upload anything received in the afternoon. That sanctimonious document called Gazette of India comes after a couple of weeks and goes straight to the raddi market, from the Government press. Then how do they communicate? They get an acknowledgement from the press that the notification is received and that means it is published and known to the rest of the world! Later the Government will solemnly affirm before the Supreme Court that the notification was published on the date shown in the notification. And these are the very people who want to computerize the entire department!
The PIB press release says that the forms will be available in the site http://www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in . Fine, the only problem is that this site does not open. From tomorrow you can file your income tax return in any of the 2000 designated post offices, but the address of these post offices is a closely guarded secret, which the department is hesitant to reveal. May be they will announce it with full page ads in newspapers after the deadline is over. The way things are going the last date for filing the return is bound to be extended, but don’t take any chances; please look for those post offices – the Post Master may inform you that he has no instructions!