The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) clarified Tuesday that no changes have been made in any of the Income-tax Return (ITR) forms which comprise ITR-2 and ITR-3. The notification regarding this has been made on 1st April 2019 which was the first day of the assessment year 2019-20. It also affirmed that only the software utility has been updated to help the taxpayers.
This clarification follows reports in certain social media that the taxpayers are facing difficulties in filing return of income in ITR 2 and ITR 3 forms owing to large scale changes in the ITR form on 11th July 2019.
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CBDT elucidated in its press release that the "software utility for e-filing of all the ITR forms has been released long back. The utility for e-filing ITR-2 and ITR-3 were released on 2nd May and on 10th May 2019 respectively. However, the 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 the return."CBDT further explained that the filing of return will not be hampered by the updating of utility as the taxpayers are permitted to file their Income-tax returns using this software 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," said the CBDT in its release.
"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," the tax department further clarified.
The updation of utility of ITR forms is based on the feedback and mainly aims 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," the tax department said.
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