Do I have to change my Indian bank account after moving abroad?
Yes, and it is an obligation rather than a housekeeping step. Exchange-control law fixes which accounts a non-resident may hold, so once your status changes under that law the resident accounts have to be redesignated into the categories open to you. The bank will not usually do it unprompted, because it does not know you have left. Leaving accounts on their old designation is one of the commonest findings in a non-resident file, and it can hold up a later repatriation while the designation history is reconstructed.
Am I non-resident under FEMA if I am still a tax resident?
The two can differ, and often do. Residency for exchange-control purposes is defined separately from residency for tax, so a single year can produce a non-resident conclusion under exchange-control law and a resident conclusion for tax, or the reverse. India runs both systems on the same transaction: tax law asks what is chargeable, exchange-control law asks what is permitted. Satisfying one is not satisfying the other. The practical answer is to determine your status under each test separately, in writing, and to date the change under each.
Can I keep my resident savings account while living in Canada?
Not on its resident designation, once your status has changed under exchange-control law. The account types a non-resident may hold are set by that law, and redesignating the existing accounts is the step that brings you within them. The account itself often continues; what changes is the category it sits in and what may be done with the money in it, including how funds may be taken out of India. The date your status changed matters, because that is the date from which the old designation stopped being correct.
Which Indian assets am I allowed to buy as an NRI?
Exchange-control law decides that question rather than tax law, and it does so by category of asset and by the funding route used. Some categories are open to non-residents and some are not, and the permitted source of funds is part of the condition rather than a detail of it. So the useful sequence is to settle whether an acquisition is permitted, and how it may be funded, before asking what the tax consequences will be. Whether something is chargeable and whether it is permitted are two separate findings.
How do I move money from my Indian account back to Canada?
Repatriation is governed by exchange-control law, and what governs it is the account the funds sit in, the source of those funds, and the head under which the transfer is permitted. That is why the designation of accounts at the time you left has consequences years afterwards: a transfer out of a wrongly designated account has no clean permitted route. The bank will ask for the trail from the source of the funds to the transfer, so that documentation wants assembling before the request is made rather than after it is refused.
My tax adviser says I am fine, so why does the bank object?
Because the bank is applying a different body of law. A tax conclusion answers whether an amount is chargeable and whether a return is due. The bank is applying exchange-control law, which asks whether the account may be held, whether the asset may be acquired, and whether the funds may be sent out of India. Both can be true at once: nothing chargeable, and nothing permitted on the route attempted. When a bank objects, what answers it is usually a document establishing status and funding under exchange-control law, not a further tax opinion.
What is the Liberalised Remittance Scheme?
The Reserve Bank of India framework under which a resident individual may remit up to an annual ceiling for permitted purposes — education, medical treatment, travel, maintenance of relatives, investment in shares or property abroad — with gifts and loans to non-residents inside the same ceiling. You declare the purpose to the bank on Form A2. The ceiling and the excluded purposes are set by the RBI and have changed more than once, so the figure to work from is the one current at the date of the transfer. See Form A2 and LRS remittances.
How do I get a refund of TCS collected on a foreign remittance?
You claim it on your Indian return for that year. The collected amount is credited against your total tax, and if it exceeds the tax due the balance is refunded like any excess payment. Two practical conditions: the collector must have filed its statement so the credit appears in your annual tax statement, and your PAN must be correctly recorded on the remittance. A salaried remitter can also ask their employer to account for it against salary withholding. See LRS limits and TCS.
