If you are a freelancer, consultant, or anyone earning income from business or profession, choosing the old tax regime requires more than ticking a box. You must file a separate form — Form 10-IEA — before your income tax return and before the deadline. Miss it, and your return is processed under the new regime […]
Most people who buy and sell stocks assume their gains are “capital gains” and stop there. That assumption is what attracts notices, defective return flags under Section 139(9), and last-minute panic during scrutiny. The truth is that the same ₹5 lakh profit from the stock market can be taxed completely differently depending on whether the
If you have made a high value transaction this year — sold property, made a big cash deposit, invested heavily in mutual funds, or spent heavily on a credit card — the Income Tax Department may already have that data. Not from anything you filed, but from what your bank, registrar, or broker filed about
Your employer chose new tax regime to calculate TDS on your salary. Your Form 16 reflects that. Now you are filing your ITR, you have done the numbers, and the old regime would save you more tax. Are you stuck with your employer’s choice? The answer is no — and the law is explicit about
Your savings account earns interest every year. That interest is taxable — but the Income Tax Act 1961 gives you a deduction against it, depending on how old you are. Section 80TTA vs 80TTB both reduce your taxable interest income, but they cover different people, different deposit types, and different limits. Many taxpayers claim the
“Income up to ₹12 lakh is tax-free now.” You have seen that line shared a hundred times, and it is mostly true — but the part everyone leaves out is what makes it true and where it quietly stops applying. The rebate under section 87A is the single provision doing all that work, and it
Many business owners treat GST return filing as a once-a-year chore handled by “the accountant.” That assumption is exactly what produces late fees, blocked input tax credit, and the dreaded mismatch notice. The reality is that GST is a continuous monthly or quarterly cycle of returns, each one feeding the next, and a single skipped
If you have never looked past the “net pay” figure on your payslip, you are leaving tax decisions to your payroll team by default. Two people earning the same cost-to-company can pay very different amounts of tax, purely because of how their salary is split. This is the heart of salary breakup and tax planning:
A common belief among retirees is that once you stop working, you no longer need to file an income tax return — or that having tax deducted at source settles everything. Both ideas are usually wrong. The senior citizen ITR rules give older taxpayers some genuine relief, including higher exemption limits and a few special
If you changed jobs and withdrew your provident fund instead of transferring it, you may have a tax bill you did not expect. Many salaried employees believe EPF money is always tax-free because it came from their own salary. That is true only after a point. Before that point, an EPF withdrawal can be fully
