USER FRIENDLY ONLINE DOCUMENTS - NEED TO MAKE EASY VIEW, SAVE AND PRINT OF ITR, INTIMATION, FORMS etc. WITH RELEVANT INFORMATION i.e. by omitting / deselecting rows having no values to save time and costs of all user of such documents including tax authorities , Tribunals ,Courts, return preparers, consultants, assesse and all user of such documents.

[DEV KUMAR KOTHARI]

USER FRIENDLY ONLINE DOCUMENTS -

NEED TO MAKE EASY VIEW, SAVE AND PRINT OF ITR, INTIMATION, FORMS etc. WITH RELEVANT INFORMATION i.e. by omitting / deselecting rows having no values to save time and costs  of all user of such documents including  tax authorities , Tribunals ,Courts,  return preparers,  consultants, assesse and all  user of such documents.

Software teams of government departments must think about it:

Documents available in soft form must be user friendly and easy to use with necessary options so that a standard form can be viewed in a tailor made format or another standard format with specified criteria. So that one can view the document in one of preferred format and with relevant information only. With power of software, it is possible. Therefore, software providers and managers must endeavor to make forms and documents more user friendly.

Lengthy forms are needed

Many forms (physical and soft forms online) are very lengthy this is because in the form all possible options, circumstances, requirements are provided. Many of such information are not applicable in case of most of assesses. Therefore, many rows are having answers to be entered into as nil or 0 or NA.

It is not possible to make forms tailor made for all. In case of ITR in new portal some options have been introduced whereby some basis information can be fed, then relevant pages will be opened for filling and irrelevant form will not appear. However, selection of options is itself difficult, in case some item is missed based on selection, then at the time of filling of data again the    options/ profile page need to be edited/ revised.

We find that ITR has many information rows, which are applicable in very few cases all over India, in percentage terms such cases can be a fraction of one percent. But these are required in standard ITR form because there is no special forms for any such assesse.

Although many ITR forms are provided in simple manner, however when there is income from business and profession, generally lengthy forms are required to be used.

Difficulties in viewing lengthy forms

It is time consuming to view long forms, during filling of data, viewing , saving as well as in case of uploaded form downloaded o saved for further requirement and working. Lot of rows which are not relevant occupy space on screen as well as in printed forms.

Tax officers have to view so many forms, for them it is causing lot of wastage of time unless they have some special tools to view page sans blank rows and rows having 0 values.

 Same problem is with other users who do not have any special tools, as may be available to tax officers, if at all.

For example, in a simple intimation in case of a company for assessment year 2020-21 the intimation is lengthy about 25 pages. Roughly more than two/third of rows are having nil value or NA. Because many rows are not applicable or have nil values.

Author could not found any facility for simple view with relevant information only

In search on web with many search options, author could not find any hint about how these documents can be viewed without irrelevant information. There seems no such option in the system.

Manual suggestions:

In course of discussions with some friends no one could inform me about any such option available in the system. However, some suggestions were made to download document then if possible, covert in PDF then word or excel format and then can edit by removing blank or 0 value rows and save it for future reference. However, it will be time consuming and will not be fool proof, because there can be mistakes in deleting rows.

In any case such edited document will not be acceptable to others, particularly before officers, Tribunal and Courts.

Software   based option is answer:

Through software options can be provided to view, save and print form with rows which have value and an impact. Other rows can be omitted/ deselected through software and there can be provided a note in bold and beginning of document that it is with only relevant rows only.

Any such option should provide an easy and error free relevant portion.

All such options should be shown on top of documents:

All such options should be on top of document, and once an option is exercised, it must remain and saved in the document and should be reflected in bold so that user of document is sure about its nature and type of option exercised for view, save and print of document.

For example, in intimation for a company received ,it appeared in language Hindi, it was time consuming and difficult to find  option to convert or view in English and first of all impression was that another intimation in English will have to be downloaded.

Later on during going through of the document, at end of last page link appeared which reads as follows:

       Click here for English version

If this be placed at beginning of first page, it would be more user friendly.

Request to readers:

Learned readers are requested to share their views and experience through discussion on article and by writing another articles on similar topics to make work easy and speedy.