Tax payment is a very important thing when it comes to filing of income tax return or any income tax related matter in India, as without payment of income tax, one cannot file their income tax return.
Have you also made tax payment in Wrong Assessment year or under wrong head?
Many a times we have seen people depositing income tax challan in Incorrect Assessment year and or incorrect head and because of which they cannot claim the same in their income tax return and it takes time to rectify such challan or take refund and hence people have to again pay the tax.
Currently if an assessee had to make any correction in challan or rectify any mistake it had to visit jurisdictional assessing officer and request for correction.
To cater the above issue being faced by many tax payers Income tax department has finally come up with a service on e-filing portal wherein now taxpayer can amend or rectify Income tax challan online on e-filing portal.
The facility is available after you login to Income tax e-filing portal under the head services -> Challan correction.
As seen in the above image there are three options available for correction in Income Tax Challan:
- Change in Assessment Year
- Change in Tax Applicable (Major Head)
- Change in Type of Payment (Minor Head)
Currently the above functionality is available for only 3 minor heads i.e. 100 (Advance tax), 300 (Self assessment tax) and 400 (Tax on regular assessment) which are majorly used while making payment of tax.
For other heads assessee will have to still visit the jurisdictional Assessing officer.
As of now there is no functionality to change the column in which tax has been deposited i.e. tax, interest, penalty or other. However, same is not much needed as tax paid in any of the above head can be used against tax payment while filing Income tax return. The issue would only arise while making payment of appeal fees or any other special payment.
As of now the functionality is available for Challan’s of AY 2020-21 and onwards.
Currently no detailed instructions are available for such functionality and it is not clear whether such request of challan correction would be processed automatically or jurisdictional assessing officer will approve the same manually and whether it will be corrected on same day or later.
E-filing team should roll out a detailed instruction manual on such functionality and clarify doubts of taxpayers.
What are your thoughts? It is a helpful service or not?