The deadline for income tax returns (ITR) filing for individuals has been extended for the second time this year. “On consideration of difficulties reported by the taxpayers and other stakeholders in the filing of Income Tax Returns and various reports of audit for the Assessment Year 2021-22 under the Income-tax Act, 1961(the “Act”), Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has decided to further extend the due dates for filing of Income Tax Returns and various reports of audit for the Assessment Year 2021-22, “the Finance Ministry said in a statement.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on September 9 extended the deadline for ITR filing for FY 2020-21. The deadline was previously extended from July to September.
A statement released by the Union Finance Ministry read: “The due date of furnishing of Return of Income for the Assessment Year 2021-22, which was 31st July 2021 under sub-section (1) of section 139 of the Act, as extended to 30th September 2021 vide Circular No.9/2021 dated 20.05.2021, is hereby further extended to 31st December 2021.”
Why the ITR filing was extended
The Income Tax Department in May announced the launch of its new e-filing portal http://www.incometax.gov.in on June 7. It said the “new taxpayer-friendly portal” would be integrated with the immediate processing of Income Tax returns. In 2019, Infosys was awarded the contract to develop the new system. But ever since the e-filing portal went live, it has been marred with technical glitches. The inability to generate OTP for Aadhaar validation, password generation glitches, and problems in filing returns to errors such as interest calculation, incorrect capturing of details from Form 16 and inability to e-verify the ITR after filing are some of the issues that taxpayers were facing while filing their ITR on the new e-filing portal.
September 15 deadline for Infosys to fix glitches
The finance ministry has last month summoned Infosys managing director and chief executive officer, Salil Parekh, over troubles with the new income tax e-filing portal. Although the IT major was asked to resolve problems on the portal by September 15, as the deadline neared, the government announced the extension of the ITR filing deadline to year-end.
As the deadline was approaching there were wide speculations about the extension of the ITR filing date.
What are the new deadlines?
The CBDT has also extended the ITR filing deadline for companies till February 15, 2022, from November 30, 2021.
The due date for filing the tax audit report and transfer pricing certificate has been extended to January 15, 2022, and January 31, 2022, respectively, from the existing deadline of October 31 and November 30, respectively.
For filing a belated or revised return of income, the last date has been extended by another two months to March 31, 2022.
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