Tacts 4 Tax

Tax - Be it direct or its counterpart, as a subject makes things for CA aspirants difficult more often than not. The sheer volume of the Text book one buys for Direct Tax itself is life threatening. You need strong hands to hold it. The plethora of Sections, sub-sections & clauses followed my equal number of amendments, some logical, some otherwise don’t make things easy. And finally there is a risk of redundancy once DTC goes live.

While I was preparing for PE II, everyone whom I spoke to emphasised quoting of sections in answer sheets along with a caveat that if a section is wrongly quoted, you lose all the marks. That was quite risky. I had huge troubles in remembering sections of Business Law, DT and IDT (in finals), forget the subsections. I somehow managed feed my mind with some section numbers which I thought were important and didn’t even make an effort to remember the others. I considered (at that time) the exercise of remembering sections a sheer waste of time.

I would have hardly quoted any section in Taxation paper of PE II. I quoted a couple of Section Numbers in DT of final and did not quote any in the IDT paper. Also there were 6 case laws asked in the examination and I did not quote a single Case Law name in my answer sheet. I wrote the concepts, logic, gave proper reasoning and conclusion. I did not fare that bad in all these papers. The scores were decently good.

This is not to discourage students from remembering sections. If someone can conveniently remember section numbers, please do. These will earn you brownie points and would be really relevant for your score. Everything you write counts.But if you just cant remember them, you need not break head on them.

Good Luck