Have discrepancies in last year’s ITR? I-T Dept gives you a chance to rectify before serving notice

Before serving a Tax Notice, the Department has decided to give you a chance to rectify your return voluntarily.

Did you do any high value transaction or other transactions in the last financial year that make filing the Income Tax Return (ITR) mandatory, but you didn’t file the return? Or, did the return of income that you filed have discrepancies or deficiency in the income disclosed than what you actually earned?

Beware! The Income Tax (I-T) Department now has almost all the information about the transactions you made in the Financial Year (FY) 2018-19 and you can no longer get away with the ITR having discrepancies/deficiency in income disclosed.

Apart from the traditional sources like Tax Deduction at Source (TDS), Tax Collection at Source (TCS) etc, the I-T Department has got the information related to your transactions from various sources such as Foreign Remittances (Form 15CC), Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT) etc.

Under information triangulation set up and data analytics, information related to GST, exports, imports and transactions in securities, derivatives, commodities, mutual funds, etc are also communicated to the I-T Department.

However, before serving a Tax Notice, the Department has decided to give you a chance to rectify your return voluntarily.

To provide the opportunity to taxpayers to rectify their ITR with discrepancies/deficiency, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has started an e-campaign on Voluntary Compliance of Income Tax on Monday, July 20, 2020. The campaign will end on July 31, 2020, which is also the last date for filing as well as revising the Income Tax Return for Assessment Year 2019-20 (relevant to FY 2018-19).

The objective of the 11-day campaign is to promote voluntary compliance and allow the taxpayers to validate online their tax/financial transaction information available with the I-T Department, so that they do not get into notice and scrutiny processes etc.

Under this e-campaign the identified taxpayers will get email/SMS from the I-T Department, asking them to verify their financial transactions related information received by the I-T Department from the various sources.

The I-T Department has reportedly identified through data analysis certain taxpayers with high value transactions who have not filed returns for AY 2019-20 (relevant to FY 2018-19) and has also identified another set of return filers wherein the high value transactions do not appear to be in line with their Income Tax Return.

Such taxpayers will be able to access details of their high value transactions on the designated portal and submit online response by selecting among any of these options: (i) Information is correct, (ii) Information is not fully correct, (iii) Information related to other person/year, (iv) Information is duplicate/included in other displayed information, and (v) Information is denied.

Moreover, such taxpayers needn’t visit any Income Tax office, as the response will be submitted online.

So, in case you have also failed to report or under-reported such transactions, it will be better for you to avail the opportunity to participate in the e-campaign for your own ease and benefit.