PAN number is a very important document and this is a person’s identity before the income tax department, but what will happen if two person hold same PAN, who will be considered as the owner of the PAN?
PAN is allotted in India by government agencies like NSDL etc. and now with advancement of technology all the applications can be filed online and now one can even get instant PAN without any fees with CBDT’s facility of Aadhar based PAN.
Also, now a person is not even required to have PAN for income tax matters as PAN and aadhar can now be used interchangeably.
However, such was not the case always, earlier people used to apply for PAN manually and PAN was allotted to assessee based on manual checking and therefore it was not easy to keep track of which PAN has been issued to which person.
The above situation lead to a scenario where 2 person were issued same PAN and both were filing Income tax return for same which cannot happen today because of technology.
Majority cases covered in above situation were such where name of assessee, date of birth and name of father of assessee were same.
To resolve the above issue the Directorate formulated a policy and the same was issued vide AIS Instruction No. 82 dated 21.06.2013 which stated that “the person who has been allotted PAN earlier in time will be the actual owner of that PAN arid the same will be retained by him and the person who has been inadvertently allotted the same PAN later in time, will have to obtain a new PAN by surrendering his wrongly allotted PAN”.
However, this solution was leading to various grievances such as refund, penalty for non filing of income tax return etc and hence to solve the same a further instruction was issued:
| S. No. | First PAN holder | Second PAN holder | Resolution |
| 1. | Not filing ITR | filing ITR | First PAN holder will be allotted a new PAN as per existing procedure and second PAN holder will continue to retain the original PAN |
| 2. | Not filing ITR | Not filing ITR | Existing procedure will be followed i.e. first allottee will retain the original PAN and second allottee will be given a new PAN |
| 3. | Filed ITR for part years | Filed ITR for part years | To be resolved after gathering information with regard to the pending demands and refunds in respect to those returns filed, with the approval of ADG(System)-1 |
| 4 | Any other case not coveted above | Resolution will be made after gathering information with regard to the pending demands and refunds in ‘respect to the returns filed by the PAN holders, with the approval of ADG S stem -1. | |
Therefore, it is requested that the field officers and RCCs may be directed to deal with such type of cases relating to allotment of one PAN to two or more taxpayers as per this instruction after proper analysis of PAN details along with examination of audit log of PAN under consideration.
Although the above instructions were issued but these are still not satisfactory as the assessee has to suffer because of the technical difficulty faced by Income tax department.
There are not 1 or 2 such cases but many such cases and you can read some of them at consumer complaints forum by clicking here: https://www.consumercomplaints.in/complaints/nsdl-ajmer-rajasthan-c595785.html These are just few of them.
In the end practically it could be said that if you haven’t linked your PAN at many places and are aware of such fact you must first visit your Local AO and they are not able to help and if there is not much refund or demand on same you must surrender the same and apply for new PAN.
