Are we really comfortable with the Government authorities?
Just thought of sharing couple of my incidents happened recently with Government officials……
As we all very much know, most of the Govt officials who interact with public do NOT themselves know the procedures to be followed and very importantly, details relating to latest developments like on-line returns, forms downloading from web sites, change in formats of forms / challans etc.
Recently, for making one of the high value payments to “Ministry of Corporate Affairs”, I faced lot of troubles and notably, nobody was able to help me.
It’s some thing like this, when we file our return for this purpose on-line, it auto-generates a challan with pre-filled details. We’ll have to print this and submit to any one of the authorized bank branches along with a cheque / DD for the applicable fee within 3 days, (will be invalid otherwise).
Problems faced:
a) The link on their website for knowing the authorized bank branches was / is not working.
b) When we enquired with the MCA office, no body knew the answer.
c) I checked up with various consultants whom I know, but they are also not sure about this but got me a list of banks, which ‘might’ accept this payment.
d) Sent my admin assistant to these banks and invariably, every bank was unable to accept this payment quoting their own idiotic reasons (all b’coz that they were not clearly instructed by the Govt officials)
i) Some says they are not authorized to accept (in spite of the fact that MCA says they are one of the authorized branches),
ii) Some says cheques are not allowed – only DDs or cash deposits are allowed (the other joint authorized signatory was in London and being high value payment cash deposit was also not possible)
iii) Some says that the cheque has to be drawn in a different name (but the form which was generated by the MCA site clearly indicates a different name, and I strictly followed that thinking that the bankers would create problems otherwise)
e) Then I checked up with another consultant in Chennai. He says that he used to make these payments in ICICI, Nungambakkam Branch. Then, I had no solution except to send the stuff to my ex-admin manager and requested him to submit it immediately since that was the last day. Though he was in hectic work schedule, was able to help me.
Another incident was / is regarding the remittance of service tax. (Need to write a separate blog about the levy of service tax, hence let me talk here only the fuss I faced in remitting the same).
I think that Service Tax authorities spend their most of the time in changing the formats of forms, challans etc very often. To our surprise, every time we remit the monies, there is a change in format with a strict instruction to all banks that old formats should not be accepted. For which, they should also let public know the new format. But what we usually hear is “Format is changed now, but we are not sure about the new one”.
When I remitted this time in Chennai in a format (which itself is a recently changed one and downloaded from the web site of Service Tax), the counter girl said “format is changed and you could try Income Tax Office for the new form”. I told that this is the downloaded form, but she said they are instructed not to accept a different format.
Then I went to Income Tax Dept and checked up about this… “Chanceless, we haven’t changed the format and also, we don’t sell forms”…. Yes, this is what I heard from the superintendent there. Since talking to him will of absolutely no use to me, I went to a law book selling shop and bought those forms whatever they had then and went back again to bank (which took about an hour in this traffic, also that it was raining).
This form insists for more details with a note that these details can be accessed to their web site. Then I called up my colleague to check the website and let me know these details. He called me back in few minutes and told these are not available on this site. I just filled up the form with whatever details I had and submitted to the bank, by clearly freezing my mind that when the concerned officials come back to me for any missing information, I’ll show who I am.
What I’m trying to say here is that taking a corporate decision for any statutory obligation is not so simple. We need to talk to various people like auditors, company secretaries, tax authorities, internal management guys at various hierarchies. After these are done, payment of concerned fees / amount is the last stage which completes the transaction and is supposed to be simple. But the situation is that we face more trouble in remitting the monies to Govt. than deciding the whole objective. Ironically, if the payment is not made on time, our Govt authorities are very perfect in threatening the corporates with penalty, interest, imprisonment etc.
“wat ? wat ? I can’t hear you clearly… “Seeking the help of Information Officer………”
Ha ha, good joke………we are in India man. What we expect from Govt Officials is to do some basic stuff, which they are supposed to do, for which seeking the help of an officer is something senseless effort. Anyway, would like to know whether any one has got justice through Information Officer anywhere in India.
