22000 Taxpayer receive Income Tax Notice on account of mismatch with Form 16

The Income Tax Department has sent notice to 22,000 taxpayers this year, including high-net-worth people, salaried persons, and trusts, that their deductions don’t match the data on their Form 16 or Annual Information Statement (AIS).

All of these intimation notices, according to a report, were sent for tax returns submitted for the assessment year 2023–2024, and they were all sent within the past 15 days.

The department sent roughly 12,000 of these notices to salaried taxpayers after determining that there was a discrepancy of more than Rs 50,000 between tax deductions reported in returns and official statistics.

Additionally, the tax department handed out notice to roughly 8,000 taxpayers who filed returns under the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) sector and whose income was above Rs.50 lakh different from data stored by the agency.

Additionally, the IT Department sent notices to 1,200 trust and partnership firms and 900 high net worth individuals (HNIs) when there was a mismatch of above Rs.10 crore.

Generally speaking, the department’s primary data analytics have found anomalies and irregularities in the returns submitted by about 2 lakh taxpayers whose income declarations, expenses, or bank account information do not match the data the department has gathered based on the transaction linked to their bank or UPI account.

This is the first intimation notice. A demand notice would only be handled if taxpayers ignored it or failed to ask for explanation, according to an official of the income tax department.

The official added that in certain cases, taxpayers have yet to include capital gains, dividend income, and some have completely omitted the information about their other bank accounts. Taxpayers can pay the overdue tax with an updated return and interest or provide a full explanation of it.

In the case of corporations, trusts, partnership firms, and small businesses, a more thorough sector-specific data analysis is being carried out, according to another official.

The second official added that work is already being done to make AIS more thorough and detailed. “The digitisation of the economy has made it easier for them to track any wilful evasion, and going forward, better syncing of account aggregators will make evasion more difficult,” he said.