A CA for ITR filing: when you need one, how to check one, and what it should cost

A salaried person with one Form 16, some bank interest and no capital gains can file ITR-1 on the portal in an hour, and the pre-filled data will be largely right. Paying someone to type it in buys little.

A CA earns the fee where judgment is involved: choosing between regimes with real numbers; reconciling the Annual Information Statement against what you think you earned; capital gains across brokers, funds and property with the right holding periods and indexation; business or professional income and whether presumptive taxation helps or hurts; NRI residency and treaty positions; carrying forward losses correctly; and anything that has already produced a notice. In those cases the fee is usually smaller than one avoided mistake.

• Reads the AIS line by line and tells you which entries are wrong, duplicated or someone else’s, and files the feedback that stops a mismatch notice.
• Computes both regimes with your actual deductions rather than a slider, and for business filers handles the one-way door of Form 10-IEA.
• Decides which ITR form applies, which is where portal filers go defective; see our form guide.
• Keeps the workings, so that when the intimation under section 143(1) or a notice arrives, the reply is a lookup rather than a reconstruction.
• Signs what needs a professional signature: audit reports, Form 15CB, and certificates banks and embassies ask for.

Chartered accountant is a protected title under the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949. Anyone using it is either a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India or committing an offence. Three checks take five minutes:

1. Membership number. Ask for the six-digit ICAI membership number and look it up in the members directory on the ICAI website. A member in practice holds a certificate of practice; ask for the firm registration number too, since the firm and the signing partner are different things.
2. UDIN. Every certificate, audit report and attested document a practising CA signs carries a Unique Document Identification Number that can be verified on the ICAI UDIN portal. A tax return does not carry a UDIN, but a Form 15CB, a net-worth certificate or a turnover certificate must.
3. Portal access. A CA who files for you should either use your credentials with your consent and in your presence, or be registered as an e-Return Intermediary with the department, or add themselves as your authorised representative on the portal. Someone who wants your password by WhatsApp and nothing else is a risk you do not need.

Tax return preparers under the department’s TRP scheme, and the many tax consultants who are not chartered accountants, can legitimately prepare returns. They cannot sign audits or certificates, and they should not call themselves CAs.

These are market ranges from independent practitioners and firms. FilingBase files a salaried return for ₹499, a business or freelancer return from ₹1,499 and an NRI return with treaty analysis, each by a named CA, because the work is standardised and the documents arrive digitally. A quote far below the range is usually a data-entry service with a CA’s name on the door.

A guaranteed refund. Refunds come from the department, not the preparer. A guaranteed or unusually large refund means deductions you did not incur: house rent to a relative who never received it, donations under section 80G to institutions that issue receipts for a commission, a fictitious home loan. The department’s data-matching catches these, and the taxpayer, not the preparer, pays the tax, interest, a penalty of 200 percent of the tax under section 270A for misreporting, and faces prosecution under section 277 for a false verification. Several thousand salaried taxpayers have had refunds reversed this way in the last two years.

Asking for your portal password with no paper. No engagement letter, no written scope, no acknowledgement of what was filed.

No acknowledgement shared. The ITR-V acknowledgement and the computation should reach you within a day of filing. A preparer who does not send them may not have filed, or may have filed something you would not sign.

A fee that changes with the refund. Percentage-of-refund pricing rewards inflating the refund.

Wrong form, fast. A return filed in ten minutes on ITR-1 for someone with share sales will come back as defective.

Filing is entirely digital: documents are uploaded, the return is filed on the portal, verification is an Aadhaar OTP, and even scrutiny is faceless. The one thing proximity used to buy, a person to sit across from, now matters only for complex advisory work, and that is a different engagement from filing. What matters is the professional: whether a named CA reads your file, whether you can reach them when the notice comes, and whether their workings survive the year.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone: Who exactly prepares and reviews my return, and what is their membership number? What documents do you need and how are they stored? Will you compare both regimes with my numbers? What happens if a notice arrives in December? What is included in the fee, and what costs extra?

The department’s own portal is at incometax.gov.in; our ITR filing service answers the questions above on the page.