Can I still claim tax collected on transfers from an earlier year?
The collection belongs to the year the transfer was made, so it is claimed in that year's Indian position rather than in the current one. Where that year was never filed, the filing is what releases the credit, and it has to be built on the bank's certificates for the transfers concerned. Where the year was filed without the credit, the position for that year is the thing to revisit. Either way, start by assembling the certificates: a collection you cannot evidence to a transfer and to the year it belongs to cannot be claimed at all.
What is the exposure for not reporting money I sent abroad?
Exposure here is charged by reference to the form and the delay rather than to the tax, which is why a year in which the collections would have covered everything owed can still be expensive to leave alone. There are two separate things running late in most of these cases: the declaration of purpose that the bank holds, and the Indian filing in which the collections are credited. They are fixed in different places and in that order. Deal with the bank's record first, because the filing is built on it.
My bank collected at the wrong rate — can that be fixed later?
Not usually at the bank, because the collection happened when the money moved and on the purpose declared at that moment. What can be put right is the destination of the money. The collection is a prepayment against your Indian tax for the year, so an over-collection is recovered through that year's position rather than reversed by the branch. Get the certificate for the transfer, establish which year it belongs to, and claim it there. Then correct the declared purpose for future transfers so the same gap does not reopen next year.
I sent more abroad in a year than the scheme allows — what now?
Establish the facts before anything else: every outward transfer for the year, across every bank, with the declared purpose and the amount for each. Households routinely count this wrong, either by treating a family's transfers as one allowance or by forgetting a transfer made early in the year from a second account. Once the total is known, the questions are whether the transfers were what they were declared to be, and what the position for the year is. It becomes a disclosure exercise at that point, and one much better made by you than found.
Does unclaimed tax collected at source eventually disappear?
It does not vanish from the records; it simply stays where it is, as money paid against a year whose position nobody has worked out. The mechanism only runs in one direction: the collection is credited when the year is computed, so an uncomputed year is a collection sitting idle. People who remit regularly can accumulate several years of this without noticing, because each individual advice looks like a small deduction against a large transfer. Add the year up before deciding the exercise is not worth it.
Why is my bank asking about transfers I made two years ago?
Because it holds the declaration for each of those transfers and is reconciling its own records, usually when something has prompted a look at the account. The request will identify the transfer by date and amount, and what it wants is the purpose that was true then, evidenced. Answer it from your documents rather than from memory, and take the opportunity to check whether the collections on those transfers were ever credited in the right year. Both questions come out of the same set of papers, so it is inefficient to do them separately.
Is money received in India from abroad taxable?
Receiving your own money is not income, and a gift from a specified relative is exempt however large. Two things do bite. A gift from someone outside that relative list is taxable to the recipient once the year's receipts pass the threshold in the gift provisions. And money that is really payment for something — fees, rent, interest, a share of profit — is taxed as that income whatever the bank narration says. The paperwork should match the substance. See gifting money to family in India.
What are Forms 15CA and 15CB for?
They clear a payment out of India. Form 15CA is the remitter's declaration of the payment and the tax withheld on it; Form 15CB is an accountant's certificate on the taxability of the amount, the treaty article relied on and the correct withholding rate. The bank generally will not execute the transfer without them, in the categories where they are required. The work is deciding the rate correctly, because the certificate is the record of that decision. See 15CA and 15CB certification.
