Thanks to the new ‘annexure-less’ Income Tax Return (ITR) forms introduced by the Income Tax authorities, things have changed for the better. Not only do the forms have a logical flow, they also provide detailed instructions for each item in the form making it easy to fill the forms. Further, because these forms are annexure-less, they remove the fear of losing one’s original documents, particularly the TDS certificates. Although the forms are lengthy and call for greater disclosures, I believe that they are a must for an assessing officer to do a preliminary review of an assessee’s return. Further, it disciplines the record keeping of assessees, particularly individuals.

The new forms also seem to be an attempt by the tax authorities to bring about standardization in the processes of disclosing the details. In the past, every assessee followed a different format of providing his or her income disclosures. The irony of the situation was that ‘Saral’ forms actually failed to provide ‘Saralta’ (ease) for authorities in reviewing them, leading to inefficiencies in the process and loss to the country.

Overall, the new forms are a great attempt although only time will tell how much ‘Saralta’ they will eventually achieve. However, further improvisation and clarity may be required, particularly on disclosures relating to aspects of Annual Information Return (AIR) filed by banks. One wonders whether these details would really provide an adequate or correct insight to the authorities. In my opinion, it would be more logical and useful for the authorities to know the year-end balances of investments of an assessee, which surprisingly, has never been asked. Could it mean that authorities are not interested in inviting any backlash from some of the influential segments of society?

Let’s hope that the new forms improve the efficiency of our tax collections. But for the time being, I feel that the authorities should be appreciated for their focused and improved co-operation, particularly for the fact that the whole department will sacrifice their personal time this weekend to help citizens in completing their filing process.

Students like Susan can now breathe a sense of relief. Jajah, a California based company dealing with voice over internet protocol (VoIP), has ensured that people like Susan can now call home without worrying about phone costs. Calls made to and from India through Jajah will now cost only Rs. 3 per minute.

Jajah, unlike services such as Skype, allows users to make cheap calls using the Internet - without the need of accessories such as headphones, microphones or software downloads. All they need is an Internet connection and a registration with the website. Users can call a landline or mobile by typing the number they want to call from and the number they want to call to.

Roman Scharf, founder of Jajaj, said:

By October, we will launch our secondary business model that will allow US and UK users to make free long-distance calls and by 2007-end India will get our free telephony service too.

He, however, declined to provide any more information.

The company, funded by venture capitalists Sequoia Capital who also invested in YouTube and Apple, also plans to add Jajah as a communication tool at well-known social networking web sites such as Facebook, SecondLife and MySpace.

Via: Business-Standard

IBM reported profits at $6.06 per share (excluding the profit from the sale of the company’s printer business) from continuing operations in the year 2006. The EPS is now slated to increase from about $6.85 to $6.91 in 2007.
Following the announcement, the company’s shares closed slightly higher on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The share price is reported to have risen higher in the after-hours trading.

Earlier this month, IBM of Armonk, New York, had announced that it expected an 80 per cent rise in the earnings per share in the next three years. Stock buybacks, increased profitability in its services business and acquisitions, among other factors, was expected to fuel the rise in earnings per share.
Company sources said that Tuesday’s repurchase is part of a $15 billion buyback announced in April this year. Last month, the company announced that the total buyback since 1995 stood at about $79 billion of shares.

The new trains, which have been added to take on the increasing passenger traffic, will run on Line 3 (Indraprastha to Dwarka sub-city), which carries the highest number of commuters. The increase in the number of trains from 349 to 362 will help to reduce the wait time from 4.5 minutes to 3 minutes.

The DMRC has also extended the peak hours on Line 2 (Central Secretariat - Vishwa Vidyalaya). As compared to the peak hours of 8 am - 12.30 pm and 4.30 pm - 8.30 pm earlier, the peak time has now been increased to 8 am - 8.30 pm. During this time, the number of train trips will increase to 436 and trains will arrive at a frequency of 4 minutes.

Line 1 (Shahdara to Rithala) will see no change as the frequency of trains will continue to be 4 minutes during peak hours.

The Delhi Metro plans to increase its fleet by 6 more trains in 2007 and these will be distributed among all the three lines. These trains are manufactured at the Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML) unit in Bangalore by a consortium of ROTEM (Korea) and Mitsubishi Electric (Japan).