An assessee has now shown a way around the problem through the use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

Tushar Dalvi used RTI and managed to get his refund, which was pending for five years, in a week's time. Dalvi, an NRI, who settled in Santa Cruz a few years ago, has a nonresident ordinary account from which the bank was deducting tax at source (TDS) on the interest accumulated on his deposits. Although he had filed returns and applied for a refund with the central international taxation department from 2002 onwards, he had not got a single reply from the I-T department.

``I was stone-walled for quite sometime and then I tried to use the services of a chartered accountant (CA). But he said he would charge me Rs 50,000 as service charge,'' said 60-year-old Dalvi, an IIT alumnus from Powai. The CA told him that some part of the money would be for `other expenses' to get the job done quickly.

Dalvi decided to file an RTI query with the I-T dept's central public information officer (CPIO) in December last year, asking about the status on his pending refund.

``The officer in charge forwarded my request to the CPIO for international taxation and I got both my refunds in a week."