“Have you filed your ITR yet?” – a common question this time of the year, as taxpayers gear up to file the income tax returns by the July 31 deadline. Yet the struggle is annual, and often left for the last moment.
According to the Income Tax department, only 4 crore returns were filed by July 22. It is not only the procrastination, but taxpayers also seem to be struggling with issues such as login failures, unresponsive pages, timeouts, and problems reflecting pre-filled data and uploading large files.
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As per a survey by LocalCircles that received 38,000 responses from 311 districts, 49 per cent of taxpayers surveyed are yet to file their returns, while 29 per cent do not believe they would be able to meet the deadline.
Forty-three per cent of respondents came from Tier 1, 26 per cent from Tier 2 and 31 per cent from Tier 3 and 4 districts, the survey revealed.
When asked: ‘How are you positioned to be able to file your individual income tax returns for FY 2023-24 by the current deadline of July 31, 2024?’, 48 per cent responded that they have filed already, while 4 per cent said they tried but had difficulty and would try on July 31. Of the 19,865 respondents, 16 per cent said they were yet to file and were convinced that they would meet the deadline comfortably, while 18 per cent said they were yet to file and it would take “significant effort” to meet the deadline, 11 per cent said it would be impossible to file by the deadline, and 2 per cent did not give a clear answer.
To sum it up, 49 per cent of the respondents are yet to file the returns, while 29 per cent believed it would be difficult to meet the ITR deadline of July 31.
When asked what are the bottlenecks taxpayers are facing, some among the 18,139 respondents cited more than one reason. Among the respondents, 38 per cent stated getting the tax filing portal to work – directly or indirectly – was an issue. Thirty-eight per cent said time is a constraint, while 14 per cent said they are still receiving Form 16 and other documents.
As many as 14 per cent cited their CAs facing difficulties, while 3 per cent stated they were unable to get time with their CAs. As many as 14 per cent stated ‘other issues’.