Income Tax: E-filing grows by 9 percent this year

Avoiding long queues of filing income tax returns, the e-filing of income tax made it possible to garner more taxpayers online.

Ministry of Finance stated on Monday that the facility of e-verification of IT returns has been used by over 75.3 Lakh taxpayers till August 5, 2016 as compared to 32.95 Lakh taxpayers last year till September 7, 2015.

The growth is over 9.8% including e-returns filed of 206.55 Lakh as on  September 7, 2015

There was also an increase noticed in Aadhar based e-verification of IT returns in FY16.

The Aadhar based E-verification was used by 17.68 lakh taxpayers during the current year as against 10.41 lakh taxpayers during the same period in 2015-16.

The initial deadline of filing IT returns was originally set to be July 31 however on popular demand the government was forced to extend it to August 5 this is also reduced as compared to the month extension provided to tax payers last year.

Over 35% of taxpayers have already completed the entire process of Return submission electronically as the report stated that 3.32 Lakh returns were digitally signed.   

Filing e-tax returns has certain obvious perks which are listen on its official website.

Avoidance of sending signed ITR-V (Income Tax Return – Verification) to CPC, Bengaluru, being a part of a completely electronic process and since everything is online it enables departments to initiate the processing of returns earlier.

As on August 5, 2016, over 226.98 Lakh e-returns had been filed in F.Y. 2016-17 as compared to 70.97 Lakh for the same period in FY 2015-16.

"Taxpayers have appreciated the early processing of Income Tax Returns by CPC Bangalore last year. Keeping the same momentum, the CPC Bengaluru has already issued over 54.35 Lakh refunds totalling to Rs 14,332 crore which includes 20.81 Lakh refunds for AY 2016-17 (current year returns) totalling to Rs 2,922 crore till 5th August 2016," the Ministry said in a statement.