Earlier this week I was on a call with a well-reputed senior CA. At some point the topic drifted to Form 15CA — which, until that moment, I’d never heard of.

Here’s the gist: every time one of their clients wants to pay a foreign vendor — SaaS subscriptions, consultants, freight, royalty, commission, anything chargeable to tax under Section 195 — a form has to be filed with the Income Tax department before the wire can leave. The bank won’t process the remittance without the acknowledgement number from that form. Above a certain annual threshold per recipient, a second form, Form 15CB, joins in.

Their firm handles a steady stream of these every year across the client base. A careful filing takes 15 to 20 minutes on the portal, and the work sits almost entirely with juniors.

That stayed with me, so I opened the portal.

What the form actually looks like

Four sections. 44 fields. Eight to twelve dropdowns, several of them cascading. A date picker that refuses to accept typed input. A 15-minute session timer that silently logs the user out mid-form. An “in-progress drafts” tab that shows a count of saved drafts but will not open any of them — a reproducible portal bug that means when a junior’s session dies, they refile from field one.

This is not advisory work. It is paying Indian CA salaries to fight an Angular SPA.

What I’ve put together

An agent that opens the portal, walks the form in order, handles every cascading dropdown and date picker, pulls the preview PDF, and parks at e-Verify.

In test runs, end to end: under three minutes per filing. The human signs off at the end.

A working proof of concept, tested against the real portal.

The bigger picture

This sits alongside the other CA work I’ve been automating. I spent much of the past week on GSTR-3B, and the flow is now automated end to end. That puts the entire monthly GST filing process at about 95% done. I wrote about the earlier piece, GSTR-1, here.

The pattern that keeps showing up: CA firms carry a lot of this kind of work inside otherwise high-value client relationships. Not all of it has to stay manual.