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New Delhi: Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) said on Tuesday, 16 July 2019, that no changes have been made in any of the Income-tax Return (ITR) forms including ITR-2 and ITR-3 since the notification issued on 1 April 2019, i.e. on the 1st day of the Assessment Year 2019-20.
The CBDT statement comes in the wake of reports in social media that the taxpayers were facing difficulties in filing return of income in ITR-2 & ITR-3 due to large-scale changes in the ITR form on 11 July 2019.
CBDT has stated that the software utility for e-filing of all the ITR forms has been released long ago. The utility for e-filing ITR-2 and ITR-3 was released on 2 May and on 10 May 2019 respectively. According to the Income tax governing authority, software utility update is a dynamic process and is continuously taken up as per the feedback received from the users/filers to ease their experience in electronic filing of returns.
Fruther, it has been clarified that the updating of utility does not hamper filing of return as the taxpayers are allowed to file using the utility which is available at that point of time. For example, more than 85 lakh taxpayers have filed returns in ITR-1 till date by using the said utility, which has also undergone update later. Therefore, the impression that the taxpayers are not able to file return due to changes in ITR form is also not correct as more than 1.38 crore taxpayers have already filed their returns by using the utility released till date. Even though the utility is being updated regularly to provide ease to taxpayers, the returns filed by using the previous version of utility will continue to be valid.
CBDT has also stated that the updation in utility of ITR forms is based on feedback and it is mainly aimed at easing the compliance burden of the taxpayers by facilitating easier e-filing. For instance, this year, the facility of pre-filling of return forms has been provided based on the information furnished in the TDS statements. This facility has been updated in the utility subsequently. This would substantially reduce the efforts of taxpayers in filling of return forms.
It has been reiterated by CBDT that there are no changes in the notified ITR forms; only the utility has been updated to facilitate the taxpayers. Therefore, the assertion that numerous changes have been made in ITR-2 and ITR-3 on 11 July 2019, does not give a correct picture.
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