Archit Gupta @architgupta

The VIPs of the Indian capital market just changed. Quietly. Foreign investors received an easing of tax on government securities. Domestic investors will continue to pay the same 12.5% on their equity gains. I will leave the fairness debate to others. It is a legitimate discussion, and plenty of people will have it loudly this week. What interests me more is a number further down in the same piece of news. Long term capital gains tax collected from Indian investors rose to 1.29 lakh crore rupees, up from around 72,000 crore a year earlier. That number is the actual headline. It means the domestic investor is no longer a junior player in this market. They are now a major contributor to the country's direct tax base. They were also the primary reason why the Indian capital markets held up earlier this year when the foreign investors exited. When a group becomes that important to the tax system, one thing tends to follow. Their filing gets heavily scrutinised. More data, more matching, more questions about whether gains were reported correctly. Accuracy is no longer optional at this scale. The capital gains entry that once slipped through unnoticed is now exactly what triggers a notice. So the domestic investor is entering a strange new phase. More powerful in the market than ever before, and more visible to the tax system than ever before, at exactly the same time. We built a nation of investors quite fast. But, the understanding of how their gains are taxed is still catching up. Now, our job is to bridge that gap.

Every ITR has two readers. -The first one is the person who files it. -The second is the Income Tax Department that finally receives it. This year, a lot of people handed their filing to an AI chatbot. Just fifteen minutes. Barely a few prompts. Filed without a second glance. This means that the first reader of the ITR was an AI chatbot. Not a human. But, the second reader is careful and pays close attention to detail. The department runs every return against your AIS, your broker statements, your bank interest, your crypto trades and your employer's TDS filings. If you hold foreign assets or income, it also receives your data from over 100 countries. It reads your return with more information about you than you gave the chatbot. Think about that imbalance. On one side, an AI that only knows what you typed. On the other hand, a department that already knows your numbers from years ago. And the only person who could have closed that gap chose not to read at all. The AI chatbot didn't fail anyone. It did exactly what it was asked. It produced an answer fast, because speed was the only instruction. Accuracy was never in the prompt. Your return will be read carefully this year. Read it now, or find out what is in it when the notice arrives.

AI is a great assistant for understanding taxes. It is not a replacement for your own judgment. Your ITR is not complete until you e-verify it with an OTP. And the moment you do, everything in that return is your responsibility. A notice never goes to AI. It comes to you. Don't stop using your brain, file your taxes on your own (or with ClearTax).

ClearTax @_cleartax

6 days ago

Yesterday, our Founder & CEO @architgupta joined @alexandermats from @NDTVProfit to break down what taxpayers are getting wrong this ITR season. The right ITR form, foreign asset disclosures, correct regime selection, and why AI chatbots are quietly causing wrong returns. Watch

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Every July, something very interesting happens at family lunches. No matter what the conversation starts with, it always finds its way to taxes. An uncle wants to know why his refund has not arrived yet. A cousin who just got her first job is holding her first Form 16 and does not know where to begin. Someone else has a long story about the capital gains they paid on a flat they sold last year. I have spent years creating this space, and I still think this is the best part of the ITR season. For one month every year, the whole country talks about money openly, at dining tables, in office canteens, and in family WhatsApp groups. That curiosity about money deserves an answer all year round. It is exactly why we created Neha. @Neha_ClearTax

Millions of taxpayers are about to lose their tax refunds without ever realizing it. I have been observing this year's filing data, and it worries me. Fifteen days before the deadline, every income tax return filed this year, across ITR1, ITR2, ITR3 and ITR4 combined, added up to just 2.08 crore. At the same point last year, ITR-1 and ITR-2 alone had already crossed 2.79 crore. That is a difference of over 70 lakh filers against a sum of only two forms. That is not a small dip. We are about 50% behind 2025 and 25% behind 2024. India needs to pick up pace. Yes, filings have improved. A month before the deadline we were 68% behind last year, and we have closed some of that gap since. But nowhere near enough. Almost three in four returns are still going to land in the last few days. I have watched this play out every ITR season for over a decade. The final rush is where the money quietly disappears. A refund comes back much less than it should. A deduction you were owed goes unclaimed. Sometimes the return does not go in at all. This is not about people being lazy. It is about people thinking they still have time. They do not. The deadline is July 31. It has not moved, and it will not. The return will not get any easier in the last week. You will only have less time to get it right.

ClearTax is a fully accredited ASP in the UAE. One of the first. You'd expect me to say the list matters. It doesn't. Not the way most enterprises are reading it. Every provider on that list cleared the same bar. Peppol certification. Security standards. Capital requirements. The list tells you who is allowed to operate. It tells you nothing about who can run your invoice volumes at month-end close. Nothing about your inter-company flows or your 300-field ERP mapping. Nothing about who picks up the phone when an invoice fails at 11pm on the 31st. Here is what every CFO should sit with: ASP appointment deadline: October 30. Go-live: January 1, 2027. Integration, data remediation, testing, onboarding: all of it has to happen before go-live. The clock is not generous. We watched this exact movie in Saudi Arabia. Enterprises switched e-invoicing vendors after going live. Their vendors were ZATCA-compliant. Compliance got mistaken for capability. So flip the evaluation. Don't ask "are you on the list?" Ask: -What broke the last time a regulator changed the spec mid-mandate? How fast did you fix it? -Show me an invoice failing, live. Show me your system healing it. -What can't you do today that I'll need by 2028? The vendor who answers that last question honestly is the one who has earned your trust. You're not choosing a vendor. You're choosing infrastructure. Every dirham of your revenue is about to flow through this decision.

Stock brokers serving over 57% of India’s active clients across the Top 20 now flow data straight into ClearTax. Just a single click on “File ITR” inside the broker’s own app, and the complete capital gains and F&O computation shows up automatically on ClearTax. Until now, ‘integration’ meant a trader came to ClearTax, chose their broker, and either pulled the data or uploaded a statement for us to read and compute. That worked. But it still meant one extra step between the broker’s record and the ITR. Now, for over 57% of active traders, that step is gone. The broker’s app sends the data straight into ClearTax for the ITR. What lands in the ITR is the same record the broker holds, the same record the income tax department already has in the AIS. That’s where accuracy actually comes from. One less step between the source of the data and the income tax return itself. Fewer hops, fewer chances for a mismatch. Because a mismatch is exactly where a tax notice starts.

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Filing ITR yourself this year? ClearTax genuinely makes it a 15-minute job: ✅ Upload Form 16 → auto-filled ✅ Pulls AIS data → catches income you forgot (FD interest, dividends) ✅ Imports capital gains from Zerodha/Groww → no Excel gymnastics ✅ Old vs new regime compared before you file ✅ Picks the right ITR form (wrong form = defective return notice) Most tax notices aren't fraud. They're just missed FD interest. File smart. Not a tip. DYOR.

@nkalra0123 AI is a great checker. We are adding AI checker to our platform

India just made retirement saving optional. Back in 2014, the mandatory PF baseline was locked at Rs 15,000 of your basic salary. Twelve years of inflation later, that money today is only worth half of what it used to be. The new EPF Scheme 2026 was the perfect time to adjust this baseline. Instead, the framework kept it exactly the same, which effectively scales back your long-term retirement benefits. Legally, both sides still have to meet that minimum Rs 1,800 a month. But anything above that is now completely optional. Here is what that actually means for your pocket: -If your basic salary is Rs 50,000, the total contribution into your PF has typically been about Rs 6,000 a month. Under the strict legal mandate of the new rules, only Rs 1,800 of that is legally required from both sides. The remaining Rs 4,200 now relies on a voluntary opt-in. If a salary structure shifts to only stick to the legal minimum, the long-term impact is massive. At an 8.25% interest rate over a 25-year career, that Rs 4,200 a month adds up to a staggering Rs 41 lakh. That Rs 41 lakh used to be the default expectation. Now, it requires active, conscious planning from both employers and employees to keep it going. Giving people more flexibility with their money today is a welcome move. But we have to acknowledge the broader picture: India’s retirement system has quietly shifted from a mandatory default to an optional model. By 2050, one group retires on 25 years of compounding. The other realises the extra take-home is gone, and 60 is too late to start over..

Almost 87% of ITR-1 and ITR-2 returns are yet to be filed this year. That means that the majority of filings in this category will hit the system close to the deadline. Currently, filings logged 30 days before the deadline are down 67% from last year and 30% from 2024. The deadline has not moved to September. It is strictly July 31. Do not leave your filing for the last week.

@ronalddas Ronald its baked into the platform. There's a validation and double check layer on every transaction registered with the tax department.

We launched a new "Double check" awareness campaign for tax. A lot of people are using AI for taxes for the first time. (You should use AI) But: You need to double check when finance and tax is involved. AI sometimes looks up the wrong year / wrong calc.

Two anniversaries, one day. GST turns 9 today. It shares its birthday with CA Day. Not a coincidence. In 2017, someone had to be first into an unfamiliar system, no precedent, no playbook. It was the CA. They learned the portal before it had learned itself. They turned invoice-matching into an art before software existed for it. Nine years later, AI is the new unfamiliar system. And the same profession that went first on GST is going first on this too. CAs haven't just kept up with technology. They've always been first through the door. Happy CA Day. Happy 9 years of GST. 🎉

@Starcommander10 Our team is looking into your experience and fixing the gap

I saw few tweets with Claude: AI for taxes with Claude - "Bangalore techies edition", a media term for people like me who live inside Claude Two types of users: I'll do it myself, or I'll get tax experts to assist me. Guess which one is the Bangalore techie. On do it yourself: AI assistance in tax is great. 26AS, AIS, TIS, all of this is new and mysterious to most people. AI explains, downloads, and interprets it. I personally love this literacy, because most users either make mistakes or run to an expert. AI is patient. It teaches, interprets, and explains, unlike a busy tax professional on a deadline. When you live inside Claude, you do everything with it, taxes included. So are we (ClearTax) dead? No. And here is why AI loves our ClearTax tax engine: Deterministic tax calculation: Millions of lines of tax code, battle tested, secure, private, and changing every year. One mistake can mean penalties and notices. Interpretation: Capital gains and indexation, choosing regimes, setting off past year losses. Statement parsing: So many brokers, so many formats, and data duplicated across them. Our engine de-duplicates it. Simple new regime returns don't need much technology or expensive tokens. We have a one click fast forward for those. You can also vibe code your own tax engine. I highly recommend trying. I am an AI maximalist and I love AI. With love, a Bangalore techie...

What I loved: Build an awesome company, set it up for succession and then go fix the most operating system where India lives. Thanks for inspiring Kunal.

Happy @kunalb11 week to all those who celebrate 😘 (Imagine if Fable 5 was out, all the social media posts would have been 17% better) On a serious note: I really love Gokul Rajaram's post on Kunal and move to Meta lnkd.in/eyK44mpz

We keep debating whether the capital gains tax rate should be 10%, 12.5%, or 20%. But we are arguing about the wrong number. The moment the indexation benefit was removed, the tax rate written in the law stopped being the real rate. The real rate now goes up quietly every year with inflation. Let us look at the math: You invest: ₹10 lakh. The timeline: You hold it for 20 years while inflation runs at 6%. The reality: To buy the exact same things today, your ₹10 lakh needs to become ₹32 lakh. Your real profit is negligible. Your money buys exactly what it did two decades ago. But on paper, the system sees a ₹22 lakh gain. And you will pay a 12.5% tax on it. That is a tax on a profit that does not exist. You are literally paying a tax on inflation. The biggest problem? The longer you stay invested, the more you get taxed on the passage of time rather than actual growth. The intent is to reward long-term investors. But without indexation, the effect is opposite - the longer you hold, the more you are taxed on money you never actually made. We see this every ITR season with property and gold held for decades. People face massive tax bills that have nothing to do with their actual returns. We aren't overtaxing real wealth. We are taxing money that lost its value while the investor waited.

40% to 60%. That is how much time our finance teams were spending just collecting, validating, and restructuring data. If you are using AI only for chatbots or email drafting, you’re missing the forest for the trees. The real opportunity isn't just "automation—it’s leverage. True AI leverage in finance requires a foundation that most companies are currently overlooking. Hint: It’s not just about the ERP. It’s about how you approach your e-invoicing mandate. I wrote about why the future of finance isn't just "faster spreadsheets," but building the data layer that actually makes AI work. With a specific focus on the upcoming e-invoicing mandate in the UAE Read the full perspective here: khaleejtimes.com/supplements/th… #Finance #AI #ClearTax #EnterpriseAI #einvoicing