ISB alumni start online tax filing service

A group of four Indian School of Business (ISB) alumni at Hyderabad today launched India's first customised online tax filing service, TaxYantra, for Indian citizens in the country and abroad. 

The web-based solution created by TaxYantra enables the tax payer to understand taxes and fill the tax return forms online. The print outs of these forms will be picked up representatives of the company and filed with the Income Tax department. The company would charge for its service.

"Our website has received about 50,000 hits in the last couple of days, and a quarter of them have been from Hyderabad and Bangalore," Nitin Vyakaranam, founder and director, TaxYantra, said.

According to their survey, individual income tax assessees spend, on an average, five hours on filing returns by way of meeting HR personnel, consultants and waiting in queue at the Income Tax office.

The four partners, including Nitin, together invested Rs 50 lakh in the initiative. They plan to offer a few other financial services to clients. Nitin said the company was also ready to directly send the tax return filings online to the department once the authorities decide to accept forms in the extensible markup language (XML) format.

D V Dharmik, chief commissioner, Income Tax department, said the department would be ready to accept the returns prepared by TaxYantra once the online connectivity with all the offices of the department was complete. This is likely to be over by October this year, he added.

Rammohan Rao, dean of ISB, said the institute's endeavour was to churn out job creators and not job-seekers.