New Annual Information Statement (AIS): What it means for a taxpayer like you

New Delhi: The Income Tax Department recently introduced a new Annual Information Statement (AIS) for the taxpayer. This has created a lot of curiosity and anxiety in minds of taxpayer as to what implications it will have for working class i.e. the taxpayer community.

AIS is basically a financial tool that brings all your financial transactions in a year at one place and also allows you to give feedbacks.

As taxpayers remain puzzled with the new AIS policy, here we decipher what it means for a taxpayer.

Making taxpayers’ life simpler

The AIS is meant to simplify your tax filing pattern by facilitating availability of all the financial transactions in one place.

Government brought this new mechanism for better compliance in income tax return filing. AIS is nothing but basically a statement of all your transactions in various entities, which is brought to one platform via your PAN.

According to tax experts, this facility would streamline the operations and would benefit both the I-Tax department as well as the taxpayer in the long run.

“In some cases, incorrect information do come. However, it is expected to become smoother and hassle-free over time. With all the important information at one single place, tax filing will become much easier for taxpayers,” Abhishek Soni, Co-founder and CEO, Tax2win told a leading daily.

“The new AIS has an another feature which allows taxpayers to give feedback to correct and amend the information which was not properly reflecting earlier,” said Gaurav Saraf, Partner, Tattvam & Co.

What if transactions don’t show up in AIS

It is pertinent to note here that currently AIS has limited reservoir of information and is rather limited to whatever details is available with I-Tax dept. Therefore, a taxpayer needs to check all related information and report complete & accurate information in the Income Tax return.

In case if details don’t match in Form26AS on TRACES portal and the TDS/TCS information on AIS portal, the taxpayer can continue to rely on the former for filing ITR.

There are talks of AIS replacing Form 26AS in the long run as the features & functionality smoothens but experts believe it is too early to talk about about its replacement.