Income-tax shocker: Data on advance tax payments missing in prefilled return forms

Form 26 AS is not indicating advance tax paid.

With the income tax-filing deadline barely six weeks away, tax professionals and individuals are in a race against time to submit returns by the deadline of July 31, 2023. But a technical glitch is making the process time consuming.

To simplify the process of filing tax returns, the amount of taxes paid in advance or cut by an employer, bank, tenant or other organisations was mentioned in income-tax returns. This was done using a pre-filling technique — mentioning the information available against a person’s permanent account number (PAN) in the tax-return forms. One had to just cross check the details and add additional information that was missing to file the tax return.

However, this key feature is missing in the tax-return forms that are being downloaded for assessment year 2023-24 (where one files income earned in financial year 2022-23). “Form 26 AS is not indicating advance tax paid. As a result, the software utilities on the income tax website are not able to auto populate the advance tax paid,” says Karan Batra, co-founder of CharteredClub.com.

This is a major change and makes ITR filing a tedious task, say chartered accountants.

“Earlier, we would look at the tax statement and fetch the details even without the taxpayer having to inform us. Now, we need to seek the details from them and then manually fill it. Sometimes, the client is not aware and we need to wait for her/him to look up the details and share,” says another Gurgaon-based chartered accountant.

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Abysmal state of affairs

The pre-filled data is not being fetched properly and a lot of manual intervention is needed, say chartered accountants. In fact, according to Batra, in some cases data for the advance tax payment of two different financial years was merged in the Form 26 AS, which is a statement of all the tax payments made or the tax deductions done by banks and other organisations against your permanent account number (PAN).

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“In one client’s case, the advance tax paid for financial year 2022-23 and for the current financial year appeared merged in the Form 26 AS. It becomes difficult to cross-check the information when there are no separate entries,” says Batra.

While 41.6 lakh income tax returns have so far been filed for assessment year 2023-24, few chartered accountants said that they haven’t initiated filing returns yet as they had faced issues last year in early-filed returns. About 6.73 crore income tax returns were filed last year (assessment year 2022-23).

“Often the data in Form 26 AS is missing and the software utilities file isn’t released even though the income tax return forms were released in April 2023. Usually, we get only a month to file the income-tax returns, even though on paper a 3-month window appears,” says a partner at a Mumbai-based tax advisory.

The MAC Utility to file tax returns has been uploaded on the income tax portal. But another one that is commonly used has not been uploaded yet.

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The income tax portal saw an ambitious change in June 2021, which was fraught with several glitches. While many chartered accountants contacted by moneycontrol.com complained about the inability to fetch the tax paid data, it is likely that the information is mentioned in a new place, said one of them. “They have changed the location of advance tax data this year,” says chartered accountant Mehul Sheth.

It remains to be seen whether the Form 26 AS data has undergone a format change or if issues with auto-filling of the tax-paid details in returns is due to software issues on the income tax portal.