Hi All,
I am in the Finance department of an IT company.
Last year, many of my company's employees submitted HRA and LTA claims for tax deductions.
For LTA, many submitted e-tickets for train travel.
As train e-ticket (booked online through IRCTC) is purely soft copy, there is no concept of original ticket copy.
The tickets have to printed by the ticket owner himself/herself.
So it is very much possible that some employees booked tickets online and cancelled them
soon without travelling and thus claimed LTA illegally by printing the tickets before cancelling them
and submitting them for LTA claim.
As far as I know,in case of online tickets, it is not possible to know whether a ticket was
used for travel or not - because PNR no. gets recycled by Railways after few days of cancellation.
In case of Air Tickets, we insist on employees providing boarding passes as proof of actual travel.
But for train e-tickets, I am facing difficulty in verifying the LTA claims.
Is there any way I can verify the LTA claims made by employees so as to discourage employees from
following this malpractice?
Similarly, many employees also submitted rent receipts and rent agreements to claim HRA.
I know from inside sources that many employees also submit fake rent receipts and rent agreements
to claim higher HRA (although they pay much lower actual rent) so as to get higher tax benefits.
Is there any way I can verify such bogus HRA claims so as to discourage employees from
following this malpractice?
Thanks in advance
Rohit
CAclubindia
