The pre-filled online income tax return (ITR) forms for financial year 2022-23 (assessment year 2023-24) are not able to reflect advance tax amount, experts told CNBC-TV18.com. This is making ITR filing process tedious as taxpayers are now required to manually enter all the instalments of advance tax, which were paid, experts say.
The chartered accountants (CAs) who help taxpayers in filing ITR are also facing issues due to this as they have to wait for the clients to share the details. Earlier, CAs would look at the tax statement and fetch the details even without the taxpayers having to inform them.
For reference, the tax which is paid within the same financial year in which the income is earned is called advance tax. It is paid in four instalments. 15 percent of the total tax liability must be paid by June 15, while 45 percent must be paid by September 14. This includes the instalment paid in June.
By December 15, the liability is 75 percent which includes instalments of June and September. By March 15, the entire tax which is 100 percent must be paid, as per the income tax law.
The reason behind advance tax payment data missing from forms
This may be because from FY 2022-23 onwards, form 26AS displays only TDS/TCS data and no other taxes like advance tax, self-assessment tax, and refund etc.
"These are now available in the AIS (Annual information statement)," said Yeeshu Sehgal, Head of Tax Market at AKM Global.
The income tax department rolled out AIS in November 2021. An AIS contains all the data regarding taxpayers’ incomes, financial transactions, income-tax proceedings, tax details, and more.
What should taxpayers do?
Taxpayer should manually ensure that all the instalments of advance tax, which were paid should be entered in the form and he/she can take those details from the challan that was downloaded at the time of paying advance tax. Sehgal said.
"The taxpayer should carefully look at these challans and ensure that payments made during FY22-23 only are entered in the form and not for any other financial year. These details have to be manually entered under the schedule “tax payments” in the Details of payments of Advance Tax and Self-Assessment Tax. The details include date of deposit of such advance tax, serial number of challan, BSR code and the amount of advance tax," he told CNBC-TV18.com.
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