filing income tax return online in 2013

My previous posts on filing the Indian IT return online dealt with the gotchas for Assessment year 2012-13. For this Assessment year 2013-14, the technical issues regarding email attachments of last year are solved, but there was a new issue.

I had downloaded the excel utility from the IT efiling website and started the process of filling it in May. It had the feature of importing previous year's return, so I could avoid typing in lots of info. There was a small confusion regarding salary income, since at first we had been issued only part A of Form-16 - employer's TDS form and salary certificate. Once part B was issued, my queries were answered.

Then the excel utility was used to generate the xml file which we upload. But after uploading, got an error, complaining of wrong country code.

Tried generating the xml with another version of MS Office, still the same issue. Finally called their tollfree helpline, immediately got the answer, that an updated excel utility has been uploaded, I can download that and use it to generate the xml, since the country code for India had been changed from 11 to 91. OK, tried a shortcut of just editing the xml file to make that change, it worked. :)