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Comment by amaranand | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, no one pays taxes in India. Your product has no market. I can speak at length about this, but it's part of the reason real estate values in India increase by 30% year over year. Everyone hides their black money in real estate investments.

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Thats not true. In all most all the s/w companies I have come across every single person has paid his taxes. I am from a business family and my dad pays a few lakhs of taxes every year. Please do not make blanket statements like this. Apart from being inaccurate it makes no sense. If no one pays taxes, how does the government run?

>"no one pays taxes in India"

I and millions more pay taxes. True about black money, though, but those are business people. Salaried people pay taxes at source, we do not get cash at all.

So they still don't need this app...

You still have to file tax returns. There are many reasons for that. Just to state one, capital gains doesn't come under the ambit of TDS.

Hmmm, I'm not sure what this means, but all you have to do in Greece if you're salaried is to go online and fill the box with the amount of money you made last year. Hardly something you'd need an app for...

It's not just salary which is taxed at source. We have Fixed Deposits which are incurring interest which needs to be declared. We may have made donations which need to be accounted for. Most of us hire a chartered accountant to do the filing. Therefore a software could be of use.

And the people who are employed by tiny companies get paid in only cash, and also do not pay their taxes.

I will admit that "no one" is an exaggeration, but India is one of the worst countries I could think of to try and start a product that helps people figure out their taxes.

Exaggeration and over generalization. You should check with a decent CA on the number of people availing their services to file tax. And just so you know there are 30 million people filing tax returns every year. Quite a low number (in comparison to the population) but definitely not a small market.

Not really. All the salaried employees have to file the returns. Every year this time, it will be a cash festival for CAs and non-CAs who charge around 150-250 to get it done. Of course, it might look like less but if you consider the volumes and throw in word of mouth + a few posters around IT offices, it might work out.

Not true. I filed IT return using this website https://myitreturn.com/default.aspx and it has handful of users

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