What if you fail to deduct TDS while making payment to foreign Nationals

CBDT guidelines for failure to deduct TDS while making payment to foreign nationals and companies u/s 195

Clarification has been sought by field officers as to whether the tax is to be deducted (under sub section (1) of section 195) on the whole sum being remitted to non-resident or only portion of representing the sum chargeable to tax, particularly if no application has been made (under subsection (2) of section 195 of the act) to determine the sum.

The matter has been examined in the board and accordingly, in exercise of powers vested under section 119 of the act, the board hereby directs that in case where the assesse fails to deduct tax under section 195 of the act, the assessing officer shall determine the appropriate proportion of the sum chargeable to tax as mentioned in subsection (1) of section 195 to ascertain tax liability on which deductor  shall be deemed to be assesse in default under section 201 of the act , and the appropriate proportion of the sum will depend on the facts and the circumstances of each case taking into account nature of remittances, income component therein or any other fact relevant to determine such appropriate proportion.

Basics of direct and indirect tax - from our knowledge session at SINE

Couple weeks back, mymuneemji was at Society of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at IIT Mumbai.

Idea of the cell chief Ms. Bhatt was to educate the startups on "must know" nuances of direct and indirect taxation. The StartupSaturday had decent response from the SINE startups and even few outsiders that day.

Our mission was to simplify the complex looking tax and get out the tangible benefit to the people attending. We kept it completely interactive and logical. Post that as well, there are few issues and queries from the audiences which we are resolving via emails and calls.

I felt like publishing a blog on key points on which the queries came up and how were they addressed by mymuneemji. I hope you will find this useful

Entity selection and formation:
Ms. Bhat was personally worried about this bit of information lagging in the startups and wanted us to educate them with the same.

• We suggest forming an entity from a long term point of view of you are confident in the basic business model. This will allow you to capitalise development expenses or at-least claim losses of the initial months in the profitable years.
• Also this will allow you to build transparency between the cofounders and the investors putting in effort or money At early stage. This will definitely allow you to build the track record for your startup.
• Best to have proprietary or a partnership when you feel you are just experimenting and have no clear business model around it.
• A useful decision chart for entity selection attached for your ready reference.

Service tax:
We discussed basics on what, when, how of the service tax law which is spreading its wings across the board.

Coverage of service tax is very wide with the advent of

• Negative list from the positive approach before. Now there are only exempt services which are defined. Rest all deemed to get coved!!
• Reverse charge is like TDS which requires the service recipient to be charging the same. Applicable for the recipient from Rupee 1 of the service provided!!

Benefits missed:

• Service tax credits are available across the board. Event the CENVAT or exciseable purchases is also available while paying the service tax. One should carefully account all the purchases so that no credit is missed.
• Specific cases like education institution, not for profit incubators, agricultural related services are exempt. In needs to study careful before deciding of the taxability and CENVAT in specific cases.

VAT and CST (State and Central Sales Tax)
Even in VAT, we went through the typicality of the local and interstate VAT. In this case as well the what, when and how were put across with the help of examples.

Need to know points:

• VAT is applicable to the goods and not on services. Some cases where there are inclusive contracts both VAT and service tax come into play. This phenomenon is called "workscontract".
• VAT works on the physical movement of goods and not on the addresses of the buyers and sellers. So LR becomes the base for a transaction and not the invoice.

Benefits

• First would be taking the set off of the vat paid while buying against the payable on selling. CST (insterstate tax) is not available for set off. Also no set off of excise duty against VAT.
• C forms can reduce the tax liability from regular state rate (selling state) to 2% only for the dealers in those goods.

TDS
Deductible by the payer of the payee's payable amount and paid to the government. This is more to avoid the tax evasion by the recipients and to make the collection of tax almost immediate instead of at the year end.

Typical things:

• Has different rates for different kinds of activities. Like for professional fee, it would be 10%while for contract it is 2% (1% in case of the individual deductee)
• The status of the deductee also matters like a proprietor or a PVT LTD company.
• Need to be vigilant before making the payments to the foreign vendors about the correct rate of tax. It ranges from zero to as high as 40% depending on various aspects of law.

Benefits:

• It is directly adjustable (if less than tax liability) or refundable (if more than the tax liability) year on year.
• We can apply for a lower deduction of TDS as a business if we feel that the total deduction is grossly more than the prescribed rate is higher than the actual track record of the tax paid and payable based on estimates.

There were other queries around knowing LBT and somethings on the Corporate laws which was addressed off hand.

Here are the things MyMuneemji shared with the team in the form of a handy duedate chart for all tax filing dates, event ppt and the MyMuneemji collateral. Moreover it's complementary for startups who want alerts on all the key duedates for signing up on the mymuneemji for the same.

Hope this helps!! 

Crack accounting & taxation headaches at low cost ... read more on yourstory.com

Glad to inform you that MyMuneemji has been featured by YourStory.in, a very well known blog for publishing about the disruptive startup ideas. 

Below is the storyline as published by the blog

Highlights on Interim Budget 2014

Highlights of Finance Minister P Chidambaram's Vote on Account or Interim Budget speech.

FM inaugurated his Interim Budger as always with glorious words from Tamil sage Thiruvalluvar which spoke of "not the spear but sceptre swayed with equity alone gives the ruler victory".

Finance minister P Chidambaram on Monday "neither populism nor individualism" is an alternative way of governance and expressed confidence that people will entrust responsibility to a "hand" that works for equity.

MyMuneemji presents below quick look at key highlights with insights from the Vote on Account:

12.10: FM hopes to peg revenue deficit at 3.3% and fiscal deficit target at 4.1% next year. 

12.00: No change in direct taxes.Excise duty cuts on mobile handsets, consumer durables, capital goods. Excise duty cut for large and mid-segment cars (20% cut), small cars and two wheelers (12% to 8% ), SUVs (24% from 30%).

11.58: Students get major relief. Moratorium on education loan interest taken prior to 2009 till 2014. - Does this mean more money for foreign schools setting up operations in India more than students?

11.55: Urban Housing Fund at get Rs 2,000 cr

    Rural housing fund get Rs 6,000 cr

  Minority affairs to get Rs 3,711 cr 

11.53: Expenditure kept at Rs 5.55 lakh crore (same as last year)

11.52: PSU Banks get a boost by fresh capital infusion Rs.11,200 Cr - Is this an NPA funding?

11.52: Rs 8 lakh cr allocated for rural credit - Continuous favor goes for Farm lending - Hope the next session doesn't propose a waiver of these credits!!

11.51: Defense Allocation to Rs 2.24,000 crore, up 10%. - We Startups need to come up with some ideas around defence needs now!!

11.49: Food, Fuel and Fertilizer subsidy at 2.46 Lakh crore. Non-plan expenditure at Rs 1.15 lakh crore. - again farmers favored - is this because this the vote bank? 

11.48: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare gets Rs. 33,725 cr - Good for society - Huge opportunity in heath care

11.45: Fresh power capacity, rural roads, highways added in last 3 months. 50000 MW of thermal and hydro power plants under construction - good infrastructure boost - No power cuts!!

11.42: Government committed to Aadhaar. Even critics will realise it is a tool of empowerment. 54 lakh transactions completed under direct benefit transfer.  - Great Governance tool!!

11.34:  Last two quarters of 2013-14 to grow at atleast 5.2%. Rupee doing better than other emerging market currencies. However, stagnation in manufacturing sector a worry.

11.29: Exports to grow to $326 bn; up 6.4%. Investment rate at 34.8%; saving rate at 30.1%. $15 bn added to foreign reserves this fiscal. Cabinet cleared 296 projects. GDP to be 4.9%. 

11.24:  Key concerns of last fiscal: fiscal consolidation and inflation. 2013-2014's fiscal deficit managed at 4.6% of GDP. Food inflation has declined but still a worry. Analysts are expecting PC to report a fiscal deficit of around 4.7 per cent of GDP

11.22: World economy has slowdown in last few years. India affected by global economy downturn but doing better than other emerging economies. 

Startup Showcase – MyMuneemji

Delighted to announce that The Hub of Startups by Prajakt Raut of India Angels Publishes the MyMuneemji story.

http://bit.ly/1kzHo6L

Here’s the story of MyMuneemji– We offer shared services accounting, compliance and reporting services to Start-ups.

Catch them on – www.MyMuneemji.com 

In conversation with Mitesh Katira, Founder of MyMuneemji – 

• Tell us about the story of your startup - Why did you start this, how did you start, when did you startup?

Run a mid-sized Chartered Accountancy firm for the last ten years, having start ups and small businesses as clients. While working with these companies, we felt the need to be able to provide a reliable, efficient and cost effective solution to these client segments which need quality accounting, compliance and reporting support. We felt the need to service existing and prospective customers using IT as an enabler. MyMuneemji was formally launched 6 months back.

• How did the co founders come together?

Harshal and I know each other for the last 30 years, we went to school together. I joined a mid-sized Chartered Accountancy firm as a partner and helped them grow the practice and more importantly bring in a process orientation in the way we managed our audits. We increasingly started using IT tools which helped us deliver more at one third the time to our customers. Deepak Pasad joined the CA firm and was the man behind the executing process improvements and the IT tools.

My interaction with Venkat and Deepak started in the early to mid 2000 when we knew each other as family friends and the bond just got stronger when WealthTree was set up in late 2006. My firm used to work very closely with WealthTree on matters that required support on Accounting, Compliance, Audits, Tax filing for WealthTree’s customers. We started discussing ideas and ways to improve customer experience. MyMuneemji is the outcome

• What challenges did you face and how did you deal with them?

We wanted to leverage technology to deliver MyMuneemji to the customers. Venkat put me in touch with one of his colleagues who was the CTO of the company where Venkat worked. Sabyasachi came with excellent credentials having been CTO with large corporations and he helped us get through the initial bit by building version 1 of MyMuneemji.

Unfortunately, Sabyasachi had to go back to Kolkata due to personal reasons and we started driving the process ourselves.

• What is your aspiration for the venture?

We want start ups, pre – revenue ventures, Non Profit Organizations (NGO), co – operative societies and small businesses to try the MyMuneemji model. We are currently in the process of migrating all our existing customers (around 350 in number) from a manual mode to a ‘shared services’ online mode. We want to sign up with 5,000 new companies in the next 12 months.

• What did you learn from the journey so far?

We believe there is a huge gap on the demand and supply side. While entrepreneurs require high quality accounting support, the quality of accountants/ accounting support available is below par. In a majority of cases, it is not reliable and stable. MyMuneemji exists to bridge this gap. One of the biggest gains to come out so far has been our own evolution in thinking on looking at things ‘from a customer standpoint’. What works and what may not work. As an established CA firm, we never felt the need to think through this aspect. Viewing this from a customer standpoint and bringing the customer at the center has been our biggest learning.

Boot strapping is another aspect of a start up. We have constantly tried to keep our costs to a minimum while at the same time doing what it requires to be done to be able to get the service off the ground. Partnerships and tie ups with key business stakeholders has been the key. Leveraging on the impact of social media and getting the team to being the brand ambassadors of MyMuneemji were also huge learnings.

• If you had to start all over again, what would you do differently?

I am currently reading a book called “The Lean startup”. I was able to establish the correlation between “Build - measure – Learn”. I realize that we could have saved at least 50% of time and effort had I read this a year ago.

Free Due-date Reminders - a Christmas Gift from MyMuneemji

Christmas is the festival of Cakes, Candles and Carrels. Cake says "be sweet", Carrels say "Love one and all" and Candles say "Light up your mind with knowledge". 

We at MyMuneemji extend warm greetings for Christmas and a Happy New Year 2014.

At this juncture, it is exciting to share that more functional version of MyMuneemji is launched. This welcomes the New Year with added visibility and pro-activeness.

As Just try our Free Signup to start getting free sms and email alerts on before relevant tax filing due-dates and avoid any interest or penalties. Do let us know if there are any suggestions and feedback in this regard to make us better in helping you.

Visibility gaining importance for the Social Ventures and NGOs

More and more businessman and professionals are taking an NGO to enjoys fulfillment of giving. Along with the Social Networks, Social funds, Social ventures and social entrepreneurs are also budding all around.


With this, the social work is becoming structured and attracting thoughtful talent. NGOs are craving to be more visible and articulate on what they are upto. Even they want to review their accounts on monthly basis and be updated on what's going on with the donations.

Mymuneemji was approached by one of such funds. Board of trustees have senior professionals who think that being tax compliant and having a timely MIS was very important.

We are glad for being able to give them the best price for this service with continuity and consistency on the service. They decided to move their accounts online from a offline unorganized accountant with lesser than what they spent before effortlessly.

The major benefits for adopting the online solution are as follows:

1. Monthly reports come handy for gauging the direction of the activities
2. Get their tax filings in time with timely SMS and Email reminders
3. Increasing credibility with the donors with transparency

One of the core members of the trust says "Apart from NGOs and businesses, Mymunmeeji can be useful idea to adopt for Housing Societies and Banks as well"

Register here for free tax reminders and updates.