More than two crore ITRs filed on new income tax portal; CBDT urges taxpayers to file returns at earliest

New Delhi: The income tax department on Thursday said more than two crore ITRs for the financial year 2020-21 have been filed so far and the performance of the new I-T portal has “substantially stabilised”. Asking taxpayers to file their income tax returns (ITRs) for fiscal 2020-21 (April 2020-March 2021) at the earliest, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said all ITRs have been made available for e-filing. “More than two crore ITRs for AY 2021-22 have been filed on the portal, of which ITRs 1 and 4 constitute 86 percent. It is encouraging to note that more than 1.70 crore returns have been e-verified, out of which 1.49 crore are through Aadhaar based OTP,” the CBDT said in a statement. The process of e-verification through Aadhaar OTP and other methods is important for the department to commence processing of the ITR and to issue refunds, if any. Of the verified ITRs 1 and 4, over 1.06 crore ITRs have been processed and over 36.22 lakh refunds for the assessment year (AY) 2021-22 have been issued. Processing of ITRs 2 and 3 will be taken up shortly, it said. The new portal was launched on 7 June and in the initial period, taxpayers had reported glitches and difficulties in the functioning of the portal. “A number of technical issues have since been resolved and the performance of the portal has substantially stabilised,” the CBDT said, adding that over 13.44 crore unique taxpayers have logged in till October 13 and about 54.70 lakh taxpayers have availed of ‘‘forgot password’’ facility to obtain their passwords. “E-proceedings and faceless proceedings have been enabled with functionalities including video conferencing for assessment and seeking adjournments or appointment and filings by authorized representatives. “Taxpayers have been able to view over 12.20 lakh notices issued by the department under the faceless assessment/appeal/penalty proceedings, to which over 6.24 lakh responses have been filed,” it said. The digital signature certificate (DSC) registration of non-residents has been enabled and overall, 4.87 lakh DSCs have been registered. Over 15.72 lakh statutory forms have been submitted, including 9.08 lakh TDS statements, 1.29 lakh Form 10A for registration of trusts/institutions, and 22,075 Vivad se Vishwas Forms till 13 October. Over 1.83 lakh 15CA and 37,870 15CB forms related to foreign remittances have been filed and more than 21.40 lakh e-PANs have been allotted online free of cost. The Legal Heir functionality has been enabled for registrations and compliance. “The income tax department strongly urges all taxpayers to view their Form 26AS through the e-filing portal to verify the accuracy of the TDS and tax payments and avail of pre-filling of ITRs. “All taxpayers who are yet to file their income tax returns for AY 2021-22 are requested to file their returns at the earliest,” the CBDT said. The government has extended the due date for filing income tax returns (ITRs) for 2020-21 fiscal twice. For individual taxpayer, the last date is 31 December. The new e-filing portal www.incometax.gov.in, launched on 3 June, had a bumpy start since the day of its launch with taxpayers and professionals reporting glitches and difficulties in its functioning. Infosys was in 2019 given the contract to develop the portal. The finance ministry had on 23 August “summoned” Infosys CEO Salil Parekh to explain why issues continued to plague the portal developed by the software major. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in the meeting with Parekh, expressed “deep disappointment” over persisting glitches for more than two months after portal launch and gave him time till September 15 to resolve all issues. Infosys CEO Salil Parekh had on Wednesday said the portal is seeing “steady progress” and taxpayers’’ concerns are being “progressively addressed”. He, however, did not say by when will technical glitches be fully resolved and all functions on the portal will be available to tax filers.