When Arun Kumar went to London on a six months' assignment, his biggest worry was how to file his income tax returns. But a friend told him about a web portal which offered e-filing and tax consultancy services, and he could file his returns easily.

It is this growing breed of e-tax filers like Kumar that is attracting entreprenuers, who are coming up with web-portals which offer customised online tax filing and computation services.

Leading the way is a group of three young executives from Delhi who quit cushy MNC jobs to set up Span Across. Ankur Sharma, Chirayu Patel, Sumit Grover and Rita Gupta, an executive programme student of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad who's helped them, claim their flagship product, TaxSpanner, can compute tax returns in just 15 minutes.

Not only that, it provides a detailed interview session for deductions, finds deductions which might otherwise go unclaimed, and also analyses and computes capital gains from shares, mutual funds, bonds and so on. "With the income tax department rolling out new return forms and changing tax codes, the hassles surrounding returns became an everyday topic of discussion. That is how TaxSpanner started," says Sharma.

To cater to different tax planning needs, the promoters will come out with two variants, TaxSpanner Quick and Tax Spanner Advanced, the first for individuals whose primary source of income is salary and interest, and the second for those who also have income from property and capital gains.

A group of alumni from the Indian School of Business Hyderabad have launched a similar online tax filing service, TaxYantra, which enables tax-payers to understand taxes and fill returns online. Alternatively, printouts of the forms can be picked up by company representatives and filed manually with the tax department.

The government of India too has a website, incometaxindiafiling.gov.in, as part of the income tax department's  e-governance action plan. Income tax practicioners say around 75 per cent of all returns filed this year will be online.

These start-ups also have value-added services. For example, instant ITR in TaxSpanner which displays the computed taxes instantly. TaxYantra is co-ordinating with the income tax department so it can send the forms directly in XML format.

The revenue models are user-driven. TaxSpanner does not ask for registrations; customers pay only if they are satisfied. TaxYantra too accepts payment only after the return is filed. Confidentiality of information is another issue taken up seriously. For instance, TaxSpanner stores user information in specialised secure servers.

But it is not as if tax-payers will no longer need the services of CAs and income tax experts. As Sunil Talati, president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, says, "There is need for some acumen on tax-related issues for an individual to fill the form. This is where CAs and income tax practicitioners come in, since the online form is no different from the manual one."

While large corporates may have responded well to online portals, tax consultants say individual tax-payers still have doubts about authenticity and security. Ketan D Raiyani, managing director of the recently launched Taxsmile.com, says, "It will take at least a year for people to adapt to online filing simply because of the fear of their data being misused.