Filing income tax returns at the last minute? Understand the hurdles that you could face, mistakes you must avoid

To listen to the podcast, click above. To read the podcast conversation, scroll down.

The due date for filing income tax returns for the financial year 2023-24 – July 31 – is now is less than a fortnight away.

At this crucial juncture, many chartered accounts and tax-payers have voiced their concerns around difficulties in accessing the official e-filing portal, downloading the annual information statement or challenges in importing capital gains or losses from brokers and mutual fund intermediaries and so on.

Moneycontrol’s Preeti Kulkarni spoke to Mumbai-based chartered accountant Suresh Surana to understand the issues that tax-payers are facing while filing returns and steps that the income tax department ought to take to resolve the issues. Surana also highlighted the measures that have already been to ease the process and the mistakes that tax-payers must avoid while completing the exercise.

Here are the key takeaways from the discussion:

To start with, the experience has become positive over the years, after the government went on a digitalisation drive, gradually making e-filing compulsory for most categories, except super senior citizens.

The time taken to process ITR has come down. Tax refunds are often processed within 15 days now.

Having said that, some challenges persist. The government now has a lot of data on your transactions as reflected in Annual Information Statement and Form-26AS.

In case of transactions such as sale of property with joint ownership, we have come across cases the AIS displays the total share instead of actual share of the individual taxpayer. Even after submitting the response through AIS functionality, the same is not getting corrected in few cases.

We have also seen duplication of certain entries in AIS.

At times, AIS displays the information not pertaining to the tax-payer.

Then, there are cases where the mutual fund amount displayed in AIS is higher than the actual investment.

The AIS offers options to flag discrepancies. Ideally, along with the existing options, there should be another category to insert comments, so that the specific issue which requires attention of the income-tax department can be mentioned.

Then, there are glitches faced while using the e-filing portal - issue of continuous buffering, which delays the online updation process.

Many tax-payers refer to videos on social media channels to file returns. There could risks in adopting this approach.

The information may be outdated or incorrect information about tax laws, deductions or filing procedures. Non-professionals may not have updated knowledge of recent changes in tax regulations.

This apart, they should avoid common errors such as choosing the wrong ITR form, not reconciling Form-16 with AIS and Form-26AS, not pre-validating bank accounts for tax refund, errors in furnishing personal information and so on.