ITR filing date extended to August 31

July 25, 2019 Finance Talk Valli Sarvani No comments

The deadline for filing income tax returns was July 31 2019. Yet, considering the problems faced by individual taxpayers, the finance ministry extended the deadline to file the income tax return to August 31.

But, this applies to only certain categories of taxpayers including individuals and HUFs who do not need to get their accounts audited for tax purposes.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) extended the deadline on Tuesday to file ITR for certain categories of taxpayers and an announcement was made on this.

The announcement did this after the appeals of several tax practitioners and chartered accountants to the government.

There are many reasons for the extension of the deadline.

Some of them are the following:

The deadline for employers to file their TDS returns had been extended from May 31, 2019, to June 30, 2019, which thereby delayed the issuance of Form 16. The deadline for issuance of Form 16 had also been extended from June 15, 2019, to July 31, 2019.

In this context, employees need to rush to file their ITR. Hence, several tax practitioners appealed for the extension of the deadline for ITR filing.

The extension gives major relief to taxpayers.

Though the filling of salary details in ITR-1 is easy which one needs to just copy-paste from Form 16, filling sources of other income like interest is a tedious process.

Furthermore, the pre-filled XML file for ITR-2 does not have the details of salary which needs to be filled by individuals. They have to provide detailed break-up of salary such as basic, HRA etc. by choosing from options given in the drop-down menu.

Another complication is the calculation of long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax on equity shares and equity mutual funds.

All these things involve more time to file an ITR. Hence, the extension of the deadline helps many taxpayers.

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