The Double Tax Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) is essentially a bilateral agreement entered into between two countries. The basic objective is to promote and foster economic trade and investment between two Countries by avoiding double taxation.

By now, many of you would have filed several tax returns of your clients or your own companies or even your own returns. It has been brought to our notice that this year, whenever an ITR form is filed electronically without the digital signature, the system shows that the ITR-V has been e-mailed to the e-mail ID registered with the Income-tax Department’s web site. Thereafter, when the ITR-V is tried to be opened, the system asks for a password. This was creating problems as the password that is generally used by the tax payer to log onto the e-filing site does not work while opening the ITR-V.

Individuals as well as corporates may have fewer occasions to meet the taxmen in future. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) is thinking of putting in place a system in which taxpayers do not meet the assessing officer or any tax official for routine assessments. In the system being envisaged by the country’s tax regime, the tax payer would not know who his assessing officer is. Assessments will be centralised at one place where a set of officers will supervise the assessments. Each officer will be specialising in certain segment of the assessment process, such as giving credit, refunds, etc.

The Income-tax Appellate Tribunal, Mumbai in the case of Mrs. Bakhtawar B Dubash v. DCIT, Mumbai (ITA No. 403 1/Mum/03), Mrs. Sudha D Dubash v. DCIT, Mumbai ( ITA No. 4032/Mum/03) has held that an amount disallowed in the hands of the Company for corporate tax purposes, should not be taxed again in the hands of its Director as the same amount cannot be taxed twice.

The forthcoming Union budget may have an anti-avoidance provision, which can effectively check convoluted transactions devised exclusively for the purpose of evading paying taxes in India. The finance ministry, said revenue department officials, is contemplating the idea of vesting powers with the commissioners of Income-tax (I-T) to declare a transaction a sham, if there is a reason to believe that its purpose is to avoid tax in this country.

To ensure impartiality in adjudication of transfer pricing disputes, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has decided that commissioners associated with transfer pricing orders will not be part of the alternate dispute resolution panel. This panel is being set up by CBDT to resolve disputes arising from transfer pricing assessments.

In the previous chapter we studied the impact of proposed tax rates and concluded it is more in favour of the rich and not for middle income group. A similar view has also been expressed by group of Senior Income Tax Officials in which they have stated “under the garb of providing long term stability in the tax regime, the tax code in fact would widen the rich-poor gap and create more economic absurdities”[BS.21/09/09] In this chapter we propose to discuss the impact of the new code on the salaried persons who are the most efficient tax payers of this country.

The Government today extended the date for filing of income tax returns by a month in three districts of Maharashtra.”The due date of filing income tax returns, due by September 30, 2009, of tax payer assessed to income tax in the districts of Pune, Sangli and Kolhapur, has been extended to October 31, 2009,”the Central [...]

Even as income-tax payers grapple with non-acceptance of their returns, it’s surely not a good time to expect refunds. Refunds across the country will be enormously delayed as the software at the new Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) of the I-T department is yet to be rid of bugs. The net result is that processing tax returns [...]

The new centralised system for processing excise and service tax which would the save tax payer’s time and money would be rolled out across the country by the end of this year, CBEC Additional Director General of Systems D P Dash said here.  The new system– Automation of Central Excise and Service Tax (ACES) – [...]