I had to file my taxes in India for the 1 month that I worked last FY. And my auditor wants a Form16 from the company. Dude, I quit the company about 1.5yrs back! Anyway, I am trying to reach out to them to see if I can get this sorted out quickly.
I don’t know if there are other better tax services in India. I have heard of a few companies that claim to make it simple and straight forward. If I remember right, one even made it to YC demo day (right?)!
But I don’t know if any of them address the issue where you have to get Form16 for a job you quit long back and probably don’t even know who to contact to get the things done. And this is even more worse in case you are away from the country. Good, if this is already addressed elsewhere. But I can think of a very simple solution to this. Why can’t there be a simple repository for the Form16s alone? At the end of the FY, when the company generates the forms, why can’t they just dump into a secured, trusted dropbox like repository that the user can then login and collect. Anytime. Without asking anyone.
Of course, you need to address privacy and security – since its your financials. The user can authorize a company to update the form into this repo. If its a one way, then any participating company can never retrieve from the repo. As long as you can uniquely identify the user and be sure to authorize the right people, this entire mess can be easily ironed out.
Can this get into the Cloud that the current govt is envisioning? Is anyone reading this blog to care about this?