Hi,
I am writing to let others know that I had filled up ITR2 form for most content and had saved the draft as I was waiting for some other details to complete it. When I opened the ITR-2 utility after a week again and tried to open the saved draft it suddenly started giving the "invalid ITR or assessment year" error. I searched on the internet but apart from a few sites which recommended using java 1.7 version there was no other info about this error. I tried with Java 1.7 but got the same error, I tried reinstalling the utility but again go the same error, so it was frustrating as I would have to spend again an hour or more to refill it from scratch. While looking at the directory where this ITR.bat is installed I saw that there is a file called "ITR_Utility.log" and when I checked it was having the log of what happens when some X M L/draft is opened and actually contained what was the error. This is very helpful because it will point you to the line in your draft or X M L where there is some error.
ITR saves the data in XML format which is a widely accepted style to represent information on the internet and it is very simple, even a layman can understand it as below. Each line in the ITR form is represented in the XML file as a labeled entry, for example our name in the ITR form is represented like below in XML file-
<ITRForm:AssesseeName>
<ITRForm:FirstName>KIRAN</ITRForm:FirstName>
<ITRForm:MiddleName/>
<ITRForm:SurNameOrOrgName>RANGANATHAN</ITRForm:SurNameOrOrgName>
<ITRForm:OrgOldName/>
</ITRForm:AssesseeName>
The words enclosed in the <> are the labels and you can see how the name is represented enclosed by labels. Each label start with <label_name> and ends with </label_name>. This is the essential format of XML so every field in the ITR form will be enclosed within these kind of labels.
So now when I looked at the ITR_Utility.log file it was saying there is some error in line #157, so go and open your save draft/X M L in an editor and see whats there in that line. For me it was the line having address and there were some special characters like " @ @ $" after the pin code. I removed them and saved the draft. Now when I opened the saved draft in the ITR utility the draft opened without error and it successfully loaded all the sheets as before. This saved me a lot of time as otherwise I had to re-enter all details freshly.
Please note that you should be careful not to touch anything in header or first few lines in draft/X M L file because they contain some specific data encoded by IT utility itself and should not be edited. Look for the error in the lines mentioned in the ITR_Utility.log and check that those lines contain your data as plainly as possible without any extra or special characters and save it.
Happy Tax filing!
CAclubindia
