An Income Tax is a tax that is charged on the annual income of the earning person. The tax amount depends upon the income of the person. All the citizens of India are supposed to pay the tax regardless of sex and caste. The ITR – Income Tax Return must be filed before the specified deadline to avoid penalty up to 10,000 rupees.
The I.T. return filing should be done digitally, making it more simple and convenient for the taxpayers. But for the super senior citizens aged 80 and above, they can file their ITR in paper format.
ITR can be filed electronically, but one must first register on the Income Tax department’s e-filing website. Once you have registered your e-filing successfully, follow the steps below to file your ITR.
Steps to perform I.T. return filing
- The first and the most important step is to collect all the important documents that are required to file for the ITR, such as salary slips, Form 16 and interest certificates. These documents will aid you to calculate Gross Taxable Income and the TDS – Tax Deducted at Source will be provided to you from the current year’s income.
Your employee will give you a TDS, which is known as Form 16 if the tax from the salary’s income is deducted. Also, your bank will also provide you with Form-16A for TDS deduction on your fixed deposit’s interest payment. Make sure that the TDS certificates are in the TRACES format and should be digitally signed.
- Your Tax Passbook is the Form 26AS. It will contain all the tax details that has been debited from your income and which has been lodged against your PAN. You must make sure that your Form 26A and TDS certificates are tax deducted from the incomes such as interest, salary, etc has been lodged with the government and not on your PAN.
The Form 26A can be downloaded from the TRACES Website. To download the website, on your e-filing website, log in and click `My Account’ and then select `View Form 26A’. The website will then direct you to the TRACES website and you can download from there.
- If the TDS certificate and the Form 26A amount do not match, then you must consult with the deductors to get it corrected. The deductors are your bank, employer or others and get it corrected from them.
If you fail to correct the error, then you will not be able to claim the tax credit.
- Once you have completed all the above formalities, you will need to calculate the total chargeable income to the tax. The total income is calculated by adding all the five different heads of income and claiming the pertinent deductions.
- After you have completed calculating the total income, you must calculate your liability tax.
- After the completion of tax liability calculations, the paid taxes must be deducted. They paid taxes include the taxes paid through TCS, TDS and the advance taxes. This is done so that one will know if they have any additional tax to be paid or have paid excess, so that their money can be refunded.
- Once you have done with any unpaid taxes, then you can proceed with their ITR filing. If any refund has to be claimed from the government, you can do so by filing your ITR. Make sure that when you file your ITR, you are filing the right form, failure to do so can result in rejected form and you will have to refill it again.
- The final step for ITR filing is the verification process. You can verify it by 6 steps out of which 5 are done electronically and one is done manually. One must know that they get 120 days to verify their forms after they have filed their I.T. form.
- If you are verifying it electronically, then you will receive the confirmation immediately. But when you have sent it through the post, then you will receive the confirmation through mail stating that your ITR-V has been verified.
- The IT department will start with the tax return processing process to make sure that all the details that have been filed by you are correct according to the Income Tax Act.