Income Tax Payment through ATM

Times of India reported that “aam aadmi” can now pay the income tax through ATM and this is currently available to the UBI debit card holders.

The bank's debit cards holders will register on the lender's website. This site is in turn linked to the National Securities Depositories Ltd which will help validate the permanent account number (PAN) of individuals and the Tax Deduction Account Number (TAN) provided to taxpayers.

After the registration, a customer can go to a Union Bank ATM and can surf the income tax menu which will display his PAN number and ask for the tax amount that is to be paid along with item-wise details of any other amount the assessee may want to include in the tax payment.

On confirmation, the tax amount will be debited from the customer's account and the ATM will generate a receipt with a special number. After 24 hours, customers can log on to the bank's website, submit the special number and print a challan.

This looks great on paper but implementation will be difficult since for most of the salaried class the tax is already deducted at source. The remaining salaried class who typically gets more than two Form-16s would probably require such a service, but there are too many individual cases which the ATM menu may not be able to handle. The main hassle is in identifying and calculating the balance tax amount rather than paying it at the bank branch. Also, it is yet to be seen whether all UBI ATMs across the country can provide such a service. If not, then with this service, I expect a similar queue outside the ATMs as we currently see in the bank branch.

Also the bigger queues are due to the fact that most people will leave it to the end of deadline for submission of Income Tax, which the ATM facility can not solve. It will another hassle to resolve ATM related issues while submitting income tax (think of the cases today where ATM card insertion does not work or the card gets stuck or money is debited fully but cash delivered is less, so on and so forth). It will be more complicated to resolve issues in such a case.

I guess the intention is noble, but it will mainly depend on the execution and should be extended to all bank ATMs.