The processing time for your income tax returns could well take only a day, as compared to 63 days now, if a proposal approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday fructifies.
The proposal is for the development of an upgraded e-filing portal that would ease income tax return filing and reduce the processing time for returns, the government announced.
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The Integrated E-filing & Centralized Processing Center 2.0 is expected to take 18 months to develop and three months to be tested before it is implemented, and an amount of ₹4,241.97 crore has been set aside for it. The portal will be operational for eight years, and the project has been awarded to Infosys, which emerged as the lowest bidder.
“The Income Tax Department currently takes about 63 days to process an income tax return,” Minister of Railways and Coal Piyush Goyal said at a press conference. “Using the new system, this would go down to just one day.”
“Rectification requests, which are currently in 2% of the returns, our estimate is that this will go down to just 0.1%,” Mr. Goyal added. “That is, of the number of rectification requests today, just 5% will remain. The remaining 95% will not need rectification.”
“This approval has significant benefits for the Department and taxpayers through various functionalities such as pre-filling of ITR and acceptance by taxpayer as a means to improve accuracy and to reduce refund/processing turnaround time drastically, and facilitation to taxpayers in resolving outstanding tax demands,” the government said in a release.
The broad objectives of the project are to provide faster and more accurate outcomes for the taxpayer, enhance the user experience at all stages, improve taxpayer awareness and education through continuous engagement, and promote voluntary tax compliance, the government said.
Mr. Goyal added that in the current version of the automatic processing system, about 23 crore income tax returns have been filed so far. He said that refunds of ₹1.83 lakh crore have been issued in the current financial year up to September 30.