Income Tax Portals: Taxsmile Vs Taxspanner

I evaluated a few online portals for income tax submission in India.

This post is not about a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of various portals, which have come a long way in the complicated Indian context of confusing and arcane tax laws and regulations. While the income tax code is getting simplified, it is not done fully as yet. The government e-filing mechanism is still based on excel spreadsheets from their website, and is difficult to use in this modern world of advanced interactive web.

However, the government has made it simple for e-citizens to file e-filing of taxes via various intermediaries. In India, like in other areas of human endeavour, the intermediaries take advantage of the complexity and confusion to offer solutions to citizens and make some money.This process continues vigourously with many online tax portals offering services mushrooming all over India.

So, I decided to compare Taxsmile (which I have been using for the past 2 years, this being the third year of use) with Taxspanner, which came with some good recommendations in a financial newspaper article. I had already completed my tax work via Taxsmile and today I thought it would not be a bad idea to just try out Taxspanner before going ahead with my e-filing.

Conclusion: I threw out Taxspanner, and would not recommend it.

Couple of reasons:

1. After painstakingly entering all the personal and tax data, I took a break of just 5 minutes to talk to someone on the phone. I did not even move away from my laptop. But after I finished the call, I touched my mouse and the Taxspanner site went to its login page ! With bated breath, I keyed in my username and password, and voila, I was inside the site, no problem there. I even saw my incomplete tax filing waiting for me to edit further, so I clicked on the same.

What did I find ? Nothing. NOTHING. No data was saved by Taxspanner. Even while entering the data, I was looking for the save button, and it was not there, so I assumed that the site must be saving my work constantly. That was not a good assumption. Look at Taxsmile on the other hand. They have a save button at the end of each section, and since we see it there, we do click it to save the precious work that we have done on that section ! It is simple and it works !!

So, my data was lost on Taxspanner. And, that was just nothing short of ridiculous and a complete waste of my precious time.

2. I found that Taxsmile was more intuitive in the way they have designed the data capture system, which more or less accurately mimics the way we would have done the tax filing in the manual world. Taxspanner is unfortunately not designed that way. It does not compute the income and taxes automatically when the data has been entered, and I do not know when they actually show the computed data, as I was thrown out of their system. They had greyed out many of the number boxes confusing the user, stating the data is not required, but at the same time they do not show what should be shown as a result of the data entry done so far at a particular stage.

3. Taxspanner also has not updated their system in line with income tax policy changes. One simple example is the 10% surcharge on the basic income tax which has been abolished by the government last year. Only the education cess of 3% is now payable on top of the computed income tax. But the Taxspanner system still shows the surcharge !

I am sure that if I dig more, I can find more such stuff not only with Taxspanner but with other sites as well. May be there is a portal which is better than Taxsmile, but I am yet to be guided towards it.

But Taxspanner failed my tests. Be careful folks !

Cheers,

Vijay Srinivasan
23rd July 2011
Mumbai