How to avoid the taxman’s knock?

Are you in the race to file your ITR?

No matter where you live, a letter of inquiry or query from the tax department can throw your life into turmoil.
For those in India it is the season to file the income tax return.

Are you still in time to file your ITR?

July 31st marks a special day in the life of the Indian tax payers if you are in India.
This date marks the deadline for filing your return in case you are a salaried individual, dabble into crypto or invest into the share market and you are not required to get a tax audit done.
This category of ITR filing constitutes the bulk of the ITR filings that happen in India.
If the numbers are to be believed then more than 200000 ITR’s are being filed per hour.
It is a mad frenzy and at times this causes the portal to lag and it also adds to the stress levels experienced by those trying to file their income tax returns or ITR’s.

Some people file their own returns and so they have to learn to deal with the income tax department’s tax filing portal.
Yet there are a lot many who take the help of an income tax return filing professional. Some accountants and chartered accounts handle the ITR filing process on the behalf of the person filing the return.
Irrespective of who is filing the return it is required to keep handy the following documents

• A copy of form 16 (in case you are a salaried employee)
• Form 16A if TDS has been deducted from a sum that is transferred to you.
• Your Pan Card number
• The login details at the income tax portal which is usually the PAN card and password
• Copy of bank account statement for the financial year for which you want to file the return
• A copy of TIS (Tax Information Statement) This is a summary of the financial transactions done by you and would list things like your s/b account interest, Interest earned by you from term deposits (Fixed deposits), Dividend income received, share sell value in lump sum, share buy value in lump sum etc
• A copy of AIS or annual information statement that lists the details of almost each financial transaction associated with any account that you may have. From bank transactions to large amounts of cash being deposited to your account and large amounts of credit card transactions would all be mentioned here.
• A copy of your balance sheet (for those doing business)
• A copy of PNL account (profit and Loss account for your business or professional)
• Computation sheet (profit and Loss account for your business or professional)

Keeping these documents handy so that the information needed to fill the income tax return is readily available at the time of updating the information in the return.

The never ending race for the Tax professional

Even though 31st July marks the first deadline for filing returns there is a further deadline of 31st Dec 2024 with a late fee.
For the tax professionals the work would not stop here.
Once this date is over they would find the audit ITR deadline approaching for businesses that need audits to be conducted on their book of accounts by a chartered account.

Final thoughts

In order to avoid getting into trouble with the tax department make sure to keep all the above documents handy and do file your income tax return.

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