Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills India's income tax collection efforts hit a snag this week when it was found that an automated data feed somehow added an extra two zeroes to the value of taxable transactions, resulting in the issuance of notices to individuals that wrongly overstated their tax liabilities. The error meant ₹100 (US$1.20) became ₹10,000 (US$ …
India is weird like this.
No social safety net but govt charges advanced tax. But if you lose your job they WONT care.
Bribes everywhere but nothing gets done properly. But you Will pay luxury tax and GST for services non existent or poorly shoddily kept.
The list goes on and on. Doesn't matter who is in charge they payoff each other.
Look I know how much corruption there is in India (I lived there for 3 months), BUT Taxes do pay for the Roads, hospitals, medical clinics, schools, national parks, etc. Imagine how much better everything could be if it wasnt for the corruption. But paying taxes means you get those things, rather than everything having to be private and controlled solely for the rich.
As for not having a social safety net, yep it's messed up. But I guess it's following the American system which also doesnt particularly have any sort of social net worthy of the name. And guess what, America is another nation with notoriously low taxes (compared to the rest of the western world). And whilst two data points is probably not enough to show causation, if you dont collect a proper amount of taxes, you cant afford to provide the safety net.
Although I can see it's a chicken and egg problem. There's no safety net, so people dont want to pay any extra taxes, and keep the money to look after themselves. But because there's no extra tax money, there's no money for a safety net...
But lets just reiterate, if there was significantly less corruption then there is at the moment, India would be a significantly better off place. Maybe there would even be enough extra in the kitty for that safety net...
"But I guess it's following the American system which also doesnt particularly have any sort of social net worthy of the name."
That may be true, but according to OECD data the US actually spends above OECD median on welfare, and more per capita than the Netherlands, Australia, UK, Norway and others:
https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm#indicator-chart
Whether the US get good value for money and any social equity from that spending is a different question, and you might reasonably ask the same of the vast amounts they spend on healthcare or law.
"The US way is to spend more on not providing universal healthcare etc than universal healthcare would cost, because fucking the poor is worth spending money on, apparently."
Done to a treat.
So well done they cannot get enough cannon fodder partly because of the high levels of illiteracy among potential recruits. The large number of felony convictions probably precludes the rest.
"There's no safety net, so people dont want to pay any extra taxes"
I don't really know the detailed situation in India, but if there really is no 'western-style' proper social safety net, they have a great opportunity to create a proper one rather than copy the west's broken model. Having today's taxpayers pay for today's pensioners is a recipe for future disaster even though India's demographics currently might support it. Allowing current workers to deposit money into a personal retirement account tax-free would encourage wider adoption of banking without workers worrying about the tax consequences.
Don't worry at some point it will come to us!
Automate tax computation with machine learning
It's so great that we are also blessed with Infosys helping our struggling public sector.
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