The Income Tax Department on Wednesday claimed issuing refund of over ₹98,000 crore during the last five months.

“The Central Board of Direct Taxes issues refunds of ₹98,625 crore to more than 26.2 lakh taxpayers between April 1, 2020 and September 1, 2020,” the Department said in a tweet. CBDT is the apex policy making body for income tax. The tweet also mentioned that out of total, personal income tax has share of ₹29,997 crore in over 24.5 lakh cases while corporate tax refunds of ₹68,628 crore have been issued in over 1.68 lakh cases. In April, the Government decided to issue income-tax refunds up to ₹5 lakh immediately.

Income-tax refund arises when taxes paid are higher than the actual tax liability (including interest). It could be in the form of advance tax, self-assessment tax, tax deducted at source, foreign tax credit etc. There is no separate procedure to claim an income tax refund. One can claim tax refund by filing the return of income in the usual manner.

A taxpayer is supposed to ensure that the return is electronically verified through Aadhaar number OTP, EVC generated through bank account or physically verified by posting the signed ITR-V (acknowledgement) to Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) within 120 days of filing the return. Normally a taxpayer has a time limit of 120 days, from the date of return filing, to verify his returns. The earlier one gets the verification done, the earlier the CPC will process one’s returns. Once the returns are processed by the CPC at the primary level for arithmetical errors etc, refund will be issued to the taxpayer.