The Income Tax Department has expressed its gratitude to taxpayers and tax professionals for making compliances in time leading to a surge in filing of Income Tax Returns (ITRs) resulting in a new record of ITRs filed on a single day. The surge of filing ITRs peaked on 31st July, 2022 (due date for salaried taxpayers and other non-tax audit cases) with over 72.42 lakh ITRs being filed on a single day i.e on 31st July,2022. The total ITRs filed till 31st July, 2022 for AY 22-23 is about 5.83 crore. The e-filing portal also set other benchmarks on 31st July, 2022 including – highest per second rate of ITR filing: 570 (at 4:29:30 pm), highest per minute rate of ITR filing: 9573 (at 7:44 pm), and the highest per hour rate of ITR filing: 5,17,030, between 5 PM to 6 PM.
The initial pace of e-filing was relatively much slower with the first 1 crore ITRs for AY 22-23 being filed only by 7th July, 2022. The pace picked up marginally, with about 2.48 crore ITRs being filed by 22nd July,2022. With the Government announcing that there would be no extension of the due date, there was a surge in filing of ITRs and by 25th July, 2022, 3 crore ITRs had been filed. By the end of the day on 31st July,2022, 72.42 lakh ITRs had been filed, shattering all previous records (maximum being 49 lakh ITRs in 2019). In the month of July,2022 alone, over 5.13 crore ITRs have been filed.
Out of 5.83 crore ITRs filed for AY 2022-23, 50% of these are ITR-1 (2.93 crore), 11.5% are ITR-2 (67 lakh), 10.9% are ITR-3 (63.35 lakh), 26% are ITR-4 (1.54 crore), ITR-5 to 7 (5.5 lakh). The number of ITRs filed during working hours (9 AM-6 PM) since 7th July, 2022 to 31st July, 2022 is around 3.31 crore, which is 58.77% of the total ITRs filed. Over 47% of these ITRs have been filed using the online ITR form on the portal and the balance have been uploaded using the ITR created from the offline software utilities.
Large number of taxpayers did their due diligence by comparing data of their income by viewing their Annual Information Statement (AIS) and Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS). A high rate of usage of AIS/TIS data was reflected by the fact that more than 5.03 crore taxpayers viewed/downloaded their AIS.
This year a large portion of the data for ITR-1 was already prefilled with salary, interest and dividend income making compliance easier for taxpayers. For other ITRs 2, 3, 4, apart from this data, property details for rental income, brought forward losses, MAT credit was also pre-filled to further ease compliance for taxpayers.
The process of e-verification through Aadhaar OTP and other methods is important for the Department to commence processing of the ITR and to issue refunds, if any. It is encouraging to note that 3.96 crore returns have been e-verified, out of which more than 3.71 crore are through Aadhaar based OTP (94%). Of the e-verified ITRs, more than 3.01 crore ITRs for AY 2022-23 have been processed (75%). In several instances, taxpayers have been getting their intimation of processing within a few minutes or hours after filing and verification of ITRs.
Further, the new facility for making tax payment (TIN 2.0) has been launched on the e-filing portal with two banks- Kotak Mahindra Bank and Federal Bank. Over 73,910 challans have been received through these banks till July 31st, 2022 totalling to Rs. 518.5 crore.
The e-filing Helpdesk team has assisted and resolved over 1.45 lakh queries this year till 31st July, 2022. Total calls answered in the last week of July, 2022 was 1,05,800 and maximum calls of 18,341 were received on 26th July, 2022. Helpdesk team also supported resolution of grievances received on the Twitter handle of the Department by proactively reaching out to the taxpayers/ stakeholders and assisting them with any issues, almost on a real-time basis.
The Department reiterates its gratitude for the support in timely compliances and requests all taxpayers to e-verify their ITRs at the earliest. The Department also urges taxpayers, who for any reason, missed the due date, to complete their filing immediately.
