Man Tells CPA About "Just One" Indian Account, Locates Four More by Dinner

The Daily Rupee, from The IndiaPay Times satire desk. This is satire.

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FREMONT, CA. A local software engineer told his tax preparer on Monday that he held “just one” bank account in India, then located four more before dinner, according to people present and a spreadsheet that kept growing.

“Only one,” he said at 10 AM, in a strip-mall office that smelled of printer toner and cardamom. “The salary account. Everything else I closed.”

He was unable to say who had closed it.

By noon, he had messaged his mother. She replied with a seven-minute voice note that began with his cholesterol and reached, in minute five, an account opened in 2006 for a school scholarship. “Some small amount only,” she said. “You were a very good student. Why you are asking now?”

The second account, from his first job, had been kept open three months in 2012 because HR told him it would close itself. The third was a joint account with his father, opened for an insurance premium at a large Indian bank, described by the father as “very important, don’t touch.”

The fourth was found at 5:40 PM inside a steel tiffin box in a hall closet, as a passbook. Its final entry, from 2009, was a deposit labeled “birthday, Mama.”

“I did not know I was a person with a branch,” the engineer said, holding the passbook with both hands.

His chartered accountant in Pune, who answers on Sundays only, is expected to respond this Sunday with a single thumbs-up. Family members said this will be interpreted as full legal clearance.

The CPA, who has seen this before, slid a fresh intake form across the desk and a pen bearing the office logo. “We’ll just take a little longer,” she said, in the voice of a woman who has watched many men discover their own finances in real time.

A senior researcher at an institute nobody could name said the pattern is common. “Every NRI household has one account everyone remembers, two that someone remembers, and one that only a mother remembers,” he said. “The mother is usually right.”

On the line marked “Number of accounts,” the engineer first wrote 1, then crossed it out and wrote 5. He then added “pending Sunday” in pencil. The CPA said this is not an accepted entry, but she kept the form anyway.

As he left, the engineer asked whether the old electricity bill for the family flat could be paid from any of them. His mother, reached by voice note, said she would check, and that he should eat something.

At press time, she had located a sixth. She described it as “not really an account, more like a feeling with an account number.”

Not satire: if your savings back home include Indian mutual funds, here is what the IRS makes of them, and why it is better to find out before tax season than during it. Our guide, The PFIC Trap: The IRS Punishment for Your Indian Mutual Funds, has the real numbers.

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