Tax professionals are racing against time with the income tax-filing deadline approaching fast to submit the returns by 31 July. However, some of the people who are trying to file their returns are facing problems due to some error in the website for filing income tax returns.
The income tax department had launched a refurbished website in which some details of the taxpayers were prefilled which included the information available against an individual’s permanent account number (PAN) in the return forms of the income tax.
In the absence of data of advance tax data on the website available, it is going to be very difficult for taxpayers and CAs to be able to file the ITR smoothly and correctly.
“If the client fails to bring to attention to the CAs the advance tax on the presumption that the CA will be able to fetch it from the website, there is the likelihood of taxpayers receiving notices from the department. It will increase the workload and heartburn. The CBDT should specifically task some with a responsibility to constantly monitor the smooth functioning of the website and various functionalities,” said Balwant Jain, Tax and investment expert.
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“Formerly beyond FY 2022-23, the details of taxes paid i.e. advance tax & self-assessment tax use to appear in Form 26AS against a taxpayer’s PAN. Therefore, while filing the Income Tax Return, this amount used to get auto-populated from Form 26AS as pre-filling technique into ITR form. However, this pre-filling technique feature is missing in upcoming tax filing forms which will be a tedious task as the Chartered accountants or any person filing the ITR will have to cross check & fetch the challans and manually fill the details of taxes paid. This will be a tedious task and will require extra effort in tax filings,” said Maneet Pal Singh, Partner, I.P. Pasricha & Co.
People are finding it difficult to file the returns as the pre-filled data is not being fetched properly and manual intervention is required by the tax experts.
Earlier, Form 26AS has been revamped to an ”Annual Information Statement” which apart from the TDS/ TCS details, shall now contain comprehensive information relating to specified financial transactions, payment of taxes, demand/ refund and pending/completed proceedings undertaken by a taxpayer in a particular financial year that has to be mentioned in the income tax returns.
In a statement, CBDT said the Department used to receive information like cash deposit/withdrawal from saving bank accounts, sale/purchase of immovable property, credit card payments, purchase of shares, debentures, foreign currency, mutual funds, cash payment for goods and services, etc. from “specified persons” like banks, mutual funds, institutions issuing bonds and registrars since Financial Year 2016 onwards.
Now, all such information under different SFTs will be shown in the new Form 26AS, it added.
Updated: 19 Jun 2023, 04:18 PM IST