Comment

I have to make a payment of £3583 (around Rs 2.75 lakh) to a university in the UK from my father’s account who is a resident of India. Now, do I need to submit Form 15CA & 15CB to the bank? Is it true that remittances up to $1,00,000 don’t require the submission of forms 15CA & 15CB by resident Indians to the bank? —Rajath
Forms 15CA and 15CB are only for NRIs/PIOs who require sending remittances abroad from India. Typically, such remittances represent sale of some asset such as a house, shares, mutual funds etc. The funds you are referring to are being sent by an Indian Resident (you father). So the above is not applicable to him. In this case, you or your father will need to approach the bank and inform them that he intends to make this remittance. They will advise him regarding the paperwork involved for sending a normal wire transfer from his account to the UK university’s account. The limit for such remittances as quoted in your mail is up to $100,000 per financial year.

My son has recently accepted employment abroad and shall be an NRI this year. He had four saving bank accounts before he left India. One is linked to the repayments of car loans. Others are linked to mortgage payments, brokerage and other such items. He is not in a position to close any of the accounts. The problem is that none of these bank branches deal with forex or any NRI-related matters. Under the above circumstances, my son proposes to open a separate NRO account. He further plans to remit EMIs (payments for his outstanding car & home loans) directly from abroad. Is this the right way?
—K D Uppal
It is mandatory for an NRI to inform all his banks and also all the companies where he is a shareholder or MFs where he is a unitholder about the change in his status within a reasonable time. Instead of informing each company, he may inform the depository participant with which he holds an account and they will do the needful. The banks will redesignate the accounts as NRO. He can use this account the same way as he used it before becoming an NRI. It is illegal for an NRI to continue to hold his normal resident bank account. The NRI is free to deal with all his investments and assets he held prior to becoming an NRI. The only restriction is that the original corpus is non-repatriable. In other words, there is no need to close the account/s.

The writer is director at Wonderland Consultants, a tax and financial planning firm. He can be reached at sandeep.shanbhag@gmail.com