Sunday, July 29, 2012

Indian Income Tax e-filing - An annoying experience

I have been e-filing my income tax returns for many years now. Each year, the MS Excel filing tool (ITR-2) incorporated new features and it is still going through a bug-fixing phase. Hard to believe that just one day to go for the deadline and still new tool is being released! For this year, I have been trying to use the ITR-2 tool from the beginning of July and I downloaded at least 4 versions of the tool from the website.
2012_ITR2_PR14.xls
2012_ITR2_PR16.xls
2012_ITR2_PR18.xls
2012_ITR2_PR21.xls

I do not see any release notes anywhere. Isn't this a basic courtesy to update the users about what was not working and what is being fixed?

Also I could not find any forums discussing the usage and experience of using the tool. Pretty strange.

The latest one as of today is 2012_ITR2_PR21.xls.
Things that does not work:
  1. Import from previous version  -Does not work. This does not work with any versions. I have the data filled up in my previous file - 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls and I am not able to import this data. The message says "Import Ok" but I see no data. Very annoying. This would save a lot of time - re-entering the data from scratch.
  2. In 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls, Calculate Tax - Calculate Interest does not work with 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls This is the reason I tried downloading the latest one.
  3. In 2012_ITR2_PR14.xls, HOUSE_PROPERTY tab had issues when multiple ownership details had to be entered. This seem to be fixed in the later version.