Its that time of the year again...

when the slaving subjects like myself pay our tribute to our lords (aka the Income tax department).

Having a long weekend on hand is ideal for this purpose since one has ample time to trawl through bank statements, salary slips, cursing all the missing pieces of paper, which need to be tracked down.

A couple of years back I hit on the bright idea of setting up a worksheet with all the calculations, so that all I need to do is plug in the figures. This has been a major labour saver and since not a lot changes from year to year my calculation comes out on a jiffy. I've also improved my filing system - previously I used to shove everything into a box and then have to scratch my head to find the various bits and pieces. Now I have envelopes labeled with each tax year for each type of document (bank statements, dividend slips, salary slips etc) and I keep filing the things every month or two. Thus things have become pretty streamlined.

Imagine therefore my horror, when I plugged my figures in and found out that I had to PAY few lakhs as taxes. I don't even have that kind of money in the bank, so spent the entire morning trying to reconcile income and PAYE taxes before discovering that it was merely a problem with the spreadsheet - the Inland Revenue has changed the format of the tax table and I had not amended my worksheet.

Anyway, I now have to pay a sum total of Rs.262 as taxes, so I'm smiling now.

Just hope the large refunds that I claimed last year and the year before were not due to a similar error.......(and no they have not paid, but this might explain the letters they keep sending, asking for more details...).

Anyway will check on that NEXT weekend, I've spent enough of this one calculating taxes. Luckily, I've also learned another trick that comes in handy when dealing with the tax man - take photocopies of EVERYTHING you ever give them - then when they ask for details later you know EXACTLY what to say, HA!.