The family CA is a good person. Cross-border work is just not what they do all day.

Your family CA has filed for you for ten years, never missed a deadline, and your parents trust them. They also filed at the default withholding rate every year: no treaty rate, no Form 10F, no mention of Section 119(2)(b) for past years.

That is not incompetence, and this page is not an argument that generalist CAs are bad at their jobs. Most Indian practices do resident work all day. Cross-border work is a different specialism with its own paperwork: reading the right treaty article, getting a TRC out of a foreign tax authority, filing Form 41 (formerly Form 10F) on the portal, and putting the treaty rate in the correct rows of the return.

A flat ITR fee does not move when that work is done, so the cheapest path is to take the bank's TDS at face value and file at the rate already deducted. The incentive, not the person, is what produces the outcome.

The rest of this page is a set of checks you can run yourself, so you can find out which situation you are in instead of guessing.

Five minutes and your own 26AS tells you whether the treaty rate was ever claimed.

Step 1. Log in to incometax.gov.in. Download Form 26AS for the last 3 financial years. It's a PDF.

Step 2. Open each 26AS. Look at Part A. TDS on income other than salary. Find the bank name and the total TDS deducted.

Step 3. Look at the rate. Most NRIs see 30% on NRO interest (Section 195). Some see 20% on dividends. Most see nothing special, just the gross deduction.

Step 4. Cross-check against your country's treaty rate on INTEREST. US: 15%. UK: 15%. Singapore: 15%. UAE: 12.5%. Kuwait: 10%. Oman: 10%. Canada: 15%. Australia: 15%. Dividends run on a different article, and US and Canadian individuals get no cap below India's 20%.

Step 5. Multiply the gap by your interest income. A ₹15 lakh NRO FD earning 7% generates ₹1.05 lakh in interest a year. At 30% TDS, ₹31,500 deducted. At 15% treaty, ₹15,750 should have been deducted. Gap: ₹15,750 per year.

Multiply by however many years you've been filing at default. That's the number.

The interest-rate gap is the one people find first. It is not the only one, and each of these is checkable against your own return.

1. Wrong article. Interest, dividends and royalties sit in separate treaty articles with separate caps. One remembered rate applied to all three is a tell.

2. TRC and Form 41 missing. The treaty rate needs a Tax Residency Certificate from your country plus Form 41, formerly Form 10F (Section 159(8) of the Income-tax Act 2025, formerly Section 90(5)). Obtained but never carried into the return is as common as never obtained.

3. NRE interest taxed. Section 10(4)(ii) exempts NRE account interest while you are a person resident outside India under FEMA. That is a FEMA test, not the income-tax one, and in the year you move the two can point different ways.

4. A resident relief on a non-resident return. Foreign tax credit under Rule 128, claimed on Form 44 (formerly Form 67) with Schedules FSI and TR, and Schedule FA for foreign assets, are resident filings. None of them belongs on a non-resident return.

5. MFN assumed. A most-favoured-nation clause in a protocol does not by itself give you a lower dividend rate. In Assessing Officer v. Nestle SA (2023 INSC 928, 19 October 2023) the Supreme Court held that a separate notification under Section 90(1) has to come first.

6. Tie-breaker never applied. Where both countries treat you as resident under their own law, Article 4(2) of the treaty decides which one you are resident of for treaty purposes, working through permanent home, then centre of vital interests. That moves the whole return, not one line of it.

7. Refund never claimed. Excess TDS does not come back from the bank. It comes back through the return, so a year with TDS and no return filed is a refund nobody asked for.

The gap is rarely just the current year, but it is also smaller than most recovery pitches suggest. Two corrections to the usual arithmetic before the examples.

First, what you recover is the excess, not the whole deduction. Second, CBDT Circular 11/2024 says no interest is allowed on a belated refund claim, so do not add Section 244A interest to a past-year estimate. The reach-back is five years from the end of the assessment year.

Rameshwar, a Dubai engineer, holds ₹25 lakh of NRO fixed deposits at 7%. Interest ₹1,75,000. Withheld at the 30% default, ₹52,500. At the 12.5% treaty cap, ₹21,875. His excess is ₹30,625 a year, so five years is about ₹1.53 lakh of principal and no interest on top.

A UK NHS consultant with ₹40 lakh across NRO deposits and bonds at 7% earns ₹2,80,000. At 30%, ₹84,000 withheld. At the 15% cap, ₹42,000. Excess ₹42,000 a year, about ₹2.1 lakh over five years.

A Singapore team lead with ₹30 lakh of NRO deposits at 7% earns ₹2,10,000. Excess ₹31,500 a year, about ₹1.57 lakh over five years.

Run your own numbers rather than borrowing these. A recovery estimate that multiplies your total TDS by five, or adds 244A interest to a condoned claim, is roughly double the real figure.

One question opens it: 'Did you file Form 41, formerly Form 10F, and collect my TRC for the treaty claim this year?'

If yes, ask for the acknowledgement number, then check your 26AS to see whether the deducted rate actually moved. Paperwork and outcome are different things.

If no, ask why. The usual honest answer is that it is extra work at this fee, which is fair. Follow up with 'can you quote me properly for it?' Some will and take it on. Some will say this is not the work they do, and that is a good answer, not a bad one.

What should worry you is deflection: that the treaty is too complicated to bother with, that it is only for large amounts, or that you would not qualify. None of those is a reason.

Four things, in order.

1. Can they name the article and the cap for your country without looking it up? Interest, dividends and royalties sit in different articles with different rates, so a single remembered number is a warning in itself.

2. Have they filed Form 41, formerly Form 10F, on the portal? Ask what they do when the name or the period on the TRC does not match the declaration, because that is where these come unstuck.

3. Have they filed a Section 119(2)(b) application, and what happened to it? Including the refused ones.

4. Will they show you, in the draft return, the rows where the treaty rate appears? If the answer names Schedule TR, they have reached for the resident foreign-tax-credit machinery.

We do this work. So do plenty of other CAs on the ICAI register. Interview two before you commit to either.

Upload your 26AS. Free, no signup. We read each TDS line, compare it against the article your treaty actually uses, and show you the excess, current year plus any past year still inside the five-year window in CBDT Circular 11/2024. Where the answer is that nothing is recoverable, that is what you get told.

If you engage us, a practising CA who works your country files the current-year return with the treaty rate in the DTAA rows, and prepares a Section 119(2)(b) application where past years are open and the case is genuine. A CA can act as your authorised representative under Section 515, formerly Section 288, so the correspondence with the assessing officer does not need you in India.

You get a complete written quote before any work starts. Book a free CA appointment if you would rather talk it through first: 15 minutes, no obligation.

Q: Is my CA handling DTAA correctly?

A: Three things tell you, and you can check all three yourself. One, is there a current TRC and a filed Form 41, formerly Form 10F. Two, does the return carry a country code, a treaty article and a treaty rate in the DTAA rows of Schedule OS, or Schedule CG for gains, flowing into Schedule SI. Three, does the rate match the article that governs the income you actually have. Paperwork without the rows, or a rate borrowed from the wrong article, is where this usually goes wrong.

Q: My family CA is a close friend. I don't want to fire them.

A: You don't have to, and this is not a firing offence. Keep them for your parents' resident filings and bring in someone who does cross-border work for your own return. Plenty of CAs are glad to hand over work that sits outside their practice.

Q: What if my CA says they did claim the treaty but I never heard about it?

A: Ask for two things: the Form 10F, now Form 41, acknowledgement number, and the TRC for each year claimed. Then open the return itself and look at whether the DTAA rows carry a country code, an article and a treaty rate. Paperwork filed but never carried into the return is the most common version of this.

Q: Will claiming past years get me flagged?

A: Section 119(2)(b) is the department's own mechanism and CBDT Circular 11/2024 sets out how applications are handled, so making one is not aggressive. It is also not automatic: the circular requires reasonable cause and genuine hardship for the delay and a claim that is correct and genuine, and the application can be refused.

Q: How fast is the refund?

A: Nobody can promise you a date, and a service that does is guessing. What is written down is that Circular 11/2024 asks for a condonation application to be disposed of within six months from the end of the month it is received. A current-year refund follows the ordinary processing of your return.

Q: Does interest run on a past-year recovery?

A: Not on a condoned one. Circular 11/2024 says no interest is allowed on a belated refund claim. Section 244A interest can arise on an ordinary delayed refund, which is a different thing.