Abdul Karim, a private service-holder, has decided to prepare his tax return all by himself this year.    

Already he has collected the salary certificate from his company and noticed the following monthly salary break-down: a) Basic salary Tk 50,000; House rent allowance Tk 25,000; Conveyance allowance Tk 5,000; Medical allowance Tk 5,000; Employer's contribution to Recognised Provident Fund Tk 5,000; and Yearly two festival bonuses equivalent to full basic salary each.

During transferring his monthly salary to the bank account, his company deducts Tk 2,000 at the source. He has also received the tax challan from his company.

Karim realised that his source of income is not complex. He has made a plan to complete the tax return preparation in five steps.

As he is a salaried person and has no other heads of income, he decided to use the IT-11 UMA return form, introduced by the National Board of Revenue a few years ago.

It has three pages and is very simple to fill up.

Karim has downloaded the PDF copy from the NBR website and printed a copy to fill it up.

Today he decided to complete the first step, which consists of the basic information about himself.

Quickly, he has gone through the first part of the tax return form and understands that he will require his national identification (NID) number, the taxpayer identification number (TIN) and the salary certificate.

He has all the documents. So, he is ready to fill up the first part of the page.

At the top left side, Karim put the tick mark over the "Universal Self" as he is calculating and determining his tax himself and on the right side, he skipped to attach his photo as he had attached it three years ago.

The photo is required to be attached by the taxpayer who is filing the tax return for the first time or for each five-year interval for existing taxpayers. Now, Karim wrote the assessment year 2022-23 because he is going to file a tax return for the income year 2021-22. The assessment year is next to the income year.

Now from serials 1 to 5, he has written his name and inserted TIN, NID number, date of birth and email address. In serial 6, he has written down his wife's name without mentioning her TIN since his wife is not a taxpayer. In serial 7, he put the Tax Circle and Zone as per the TIN.

As he is residing in Bangladesh, he put the tick mark over the "Resident"; and then wrote the name and address of his current employer in line with the salary certificate.

He added the present address, office telephone and personal mobile number in serials 10 to 12.

Karim identified a mistake while inserting the TIN. So, he had to overwrite the number. He is thinking if he could fill up the form in the computer.

This would allow him to avoid overwriting and save the file for the next year.

Tomorrow in the second step, he will calculate his taxable income and then tax liability based on the above information.

The author is lead consultant of Taxpert, an online tax training centre.