Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about the AIS and how increasingly it is becoming an important document for filing returns. Why is that?
Well, it’s because AIS plays a crucial role in increasing voluntary compliance. Before you file your return, you can refer to the AIS to double-check your income figures. It’s like having an extra resource at your disposal to ensure that you’re reporting everything correctly.
What is the AIS?
It is a document that contains your financial information in various sections that contain details such as:
- savings account interest
- dividends
- capital gains
- rent received
- purchase and sale transactions of securities/immovable properties
- foreign remittances
- GST turnover
and more.
Why is the importance of AIS on the rise?
As technology advances and information sharing becomes more accessible, the ITD has access to a vast amount of data. They can effortlessly compare the income and various financial transactions you report in your ITR with the information in the AIS and ensure that you are being transparent with your tax declarations
Hence, we can say it is one of the ways for ITD to keep a check on underreporting or misreporting of income.
How does the information in AIS get updated?
The AIS draws data from sources like annual information returns filed by employers and financial entities such as CDSL/ NSDL, RTAs, banks, SEBI, CBIC, MoMSME, CDAL, etc.
So, the objective of the AIS is:
- Display complete information with a facility to provide online feedback
- Promote voluntary compliance and enable seamless prefilling of return
- Deter non-compliance
How to use AIS for ITR filing?
Firstly, you can use AIS to ensure accurate reporting of your income while filing your ITR as all your financial information is collected by the ITD through the AIS.
Now let’s say you forgot to report your savings account interest while filing your ITR. Now, the ITD can easily spot this because of the AIS, which contains such information.
The AIS in the recent past has made quite an impact as ITD has sent an email campaign to a whopping number of taxpayers who didn’t match their income with the AIS in past financial years.
In response to the email, the taxpayers were either required to provide feedback giving clarification on particular transactions or to file an updated return.
How to download AIS from the income tax portal?
- Login to the e-filing portal using your PAN & password
- From the dashboard, navigate to AIS
- Click on Proceed
- Click on the AIS tab besides the Instructions tab
- Click on Download
How to provide AIS feedback?
It is possible that the information in your AIS doesn’t match your personal records, which in turn can result in an intimation/notice from the ITD.
In such cases, you can rectify the mistakes by submitting AIS feedback on the IT portal.
Here’s a post on how to submit AIS feedback.
Hope this clears all your questions around AIS.