Letter to FM: Make investment in various tax departments to ensure world's best e-government practices

At TaxSpanner.com, we have realised that the biggest pain point for taxpayers is the interface of various tax departments. Though e-filing is becoming mandatory for more and more tax returns, the process of e-filing is still not that easy and hence SMEs still have to depend on a service provider to help them with the liaison.

Compliances such as RBI and tax departments are very costly. E-filing of tax returns has started to make life easier for taxpayers, but there is still continuous investment that is required to be made by income tax, service tax, and other tax departments to come at par with the world's best e-government practices.

We end up spending about 30 per cent of our profits towards taxation. The government's intent is to utilise the taxes properly but their implementation tells a different story. Electronic service delivery to citizens for all the government schemes is the only solution. E-filing of tax returns is one such step which needs to be replicated across all government sectors.

Increasing the taxpayer base is the single most important step which the government needs to take. For this to happen, implementation of direct tax codes (DTC) and goods and service tax (GST) is a must. And then, a flourishing industry of compliance e-return intermediaries like Taxspanner.com can delight the taxpayers with online compliance services.

Taxpayer's request

We hear a lot of grievances from the taxpayers. On behalf of the taxpayers, specially salaried ones, we recommend three actions - stop black money generation because there is a general pain in salaried taxpayers that while they are forced to pay their taxes up to the last rupee, businessmen get away with lot of tax payments by utilising the parallel black economy; increase tax deduction on long-term savings because retirement savings is the need of the hour in India due to lack of social security plans; and finally fix the tax laws for 3-5 years rather than changing them every year in the budget.

(Ankur Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of TaxSpanner.com. As told to Techcircle.in's Nikita Peer)