Do you know that Income Tax Department offers your tax filing services at your door step with help of a trained and certified professional who can help you with tax filing and in many cases totally FREE of cost or at a small fees ? Let me introduce to the concept of TRPS (Tax Return Preparer Scheme) . Just like you have CA , you have something called as TRP or “Tax Return Preparer” trained by Income Tax Department for helping a tax payer in preparing and filing his income tax returns.
What does a Tax Return Preparer (TRP) do ?
Mainly a TRP (Tax Return Preparer) helps a person to file his income tax returns. But lets see it in detail. Mainly a TRP shall
- Prepare the return with due diligence;
- Affix his signature on the return prepared by him;
- Furnish the return with the Assessing Officer having the jurisdiction over the concerned assessee or to any other officer or agenc as may be directed by the Resource Centre with the approval of the Board;
- Hand over a copy of the return to the person whose return is prepared and furnished by him;
- Retain a copy of the acknowledgment of having furnished the return;
- In respect of returns prepared and furnished by him during a month, maintain record of the following, namely
- the name of assessees whose returns of income have been prepared and furnished by him during that month;
- the permanent account number of such assessees;
- assessment year;
- date of furnishing the return;
- acknowledgment number;
- jurisdiction of the Assessing Officer;
- amount of income declared in the return;
- amount of tax payable;
- amount of tax paid;
- The fee charged and received by him
How to Find a TRP for yourself ?
Note that you can find a TRP in your home town or near you and he will visit your home/office and do all the work for you. You can visit this webpage and find out a TRP in your city. Or you can fix an appointment by filling up this form and a TRP will call you back to confirm your appointment. Even if you are doing everything on your own and want some help on filing your ITR (download this ITR FAQ guidebook), you can tax online help by asking question here and you will get back a call for help.
You can also call the helpline at 1800-10-23738 or mail to helpdesk@trpscheme.com
How much does a TRP charge as Fees ?
Now this is a little interesting and you should know this. Income Tax Department knows that most of the individuals do not file their ITR, because they have no idea how to do it and hence they either dont pay tax or just keep delaying it. So if someone knows that he will get help in filing the Income Tax Return (ITR) at his door step, the chances are many people will give it a try and hence the tax revenues will go up for Govt.
So Income Tax Department pays incentives to TRP for every returns filed by them. The amount of incentive depends on how many tax returns you have filed till now . If you are filing it for the first time, then the incentive is 3% of the tax paid . If a person is filing his returns for 2nd time in life, then its 2% incentive and for 3rd time its 1% . The higher incentive is given when someone files his return for the first time, because its his entry into tax filing world and generally people shy away from that first time only. A TRP will not get any incentive from govt if a person has already filed his returns more than 3 times. So in a nutshell, TRP’s incentive is directly linked to how many more tax payers they can add to the pool of tax payers.
Upto Rs 250 as charges
However TRP’s are also allowed to charge upto Rs 250 from the income tax payer if he wants to . So some TRP’s charge the fees and some dont if they know that their incentive will cover their charges.
To explain to you with an example. Lets say if a person has paid Rs 20,000 as income tax. Then as an incentive , a TRP will be 3% of 20,000 – which is Rs 600 . Now a TRP might not charge you directly because he anyways is going to get it from govt, or if he feels – He can still ask your for some money as fees (subject to maximum Rs 250) .
However lets say your income tax payable is just Rs 2,000 , in which case 3% of 2,000 is just Rs 60 and surely the TRP will ask you for his fees . However its always a good idea for you to know how he is being paid so that you can tell him and get it negotiated. But I think if they do a good job, there is nothing wrong in paying their small fees , at the end they give you door step service.
Note that these TRP’s are actually trained by Income Tax Department with help of third party companies like NIIT. This step was taken by Income tax department to raise awareness level of tax filing among tax payers, to give them door step services and at the end help in generating self employed through this scheme. There are various TRP’s who have filed tax returns for thousands of individuals and now serve a big client base.