E-Filing Of Income Tax Returns Jumps 20% Till August 1
About 2.33 crore people submitted their returns as on August 1 for financial year 2016-17.
Online filing of income tax returns is likely to have jumped over 20 percent, with about 2.33 crore people submitting their returns as on August 1 for financial year 2016-17, a senior finance ministry official told BloombergQuint.
Income tax returns, excluding those filed by individuals manually, received as on August 1, 2016 were 1.92 crore, the same official quoted above said requesting anonymity.
Income tax assessees have time till August 5 to file their returns to the income tax department, after the date was extended from July 31 on Monday.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes, the apex decision making body for direct taxes, extended the time to file returns by five days as many applicants were facing technical issues.
There were some complaints that taxpayers were not being able to log on to the e-filing website of income tax department, or were not able to link Aadhaar with PAN because of different names reflected in PAN and Aadhaar database, CBDT had said.
In 2016 as well, the income tax department had extended the date for filing returns till August 5 in rest of India, and till August 31 in Jammu and Kashmir.
Sudhir Kapadia, national tax leader at EY, attributes this rise in returns to the implementation of the Goods and Service Tax (GST), demonetisation and number of measures taken by the government to check cash transactions.
Those who were earlier dodging payment of income tax, will not be able to do so anymore.Sudhir Kapadia, National Tax Leader, EY
The tax collection data for assessment year 2014-15, i.e, financial year 2013-14 shows that 3.91 crore returns were filed by Indians, of which 1.85 crore did not pay any tax.
According to the same official quoted above, around 30,000 returns revised by individuals during the demonetisation period (November 8-December 30, 2016) were scrutinised for suspicious information.
To unearth black money from the economy, the tax department launched ‘Operation Clean Money’ initiative and identified around 18 lakh accounts in which suspicious deposits were made during demonetisation. In the second phase of the same initiative, the department identified 5.56 lakh individuals and asked them to submit responses online.