Smooth filing of I-T returns on last day

Signalling the spread of digitisation in India, income tax (I-T) offices across the country did not witness any rush of assessees waiting to manually file their income tax returns for the 2016-17 fiscal by the deadline on Saturday. The government had extended the deadline for filing of IT returns for the fiscal 2016-17 (assessment year 2017-18) to August 5 from the earlier July 31 date due to technical reasons.

According to an official, at income tax office in Delhi, only short queues of assessees were witnessed at one of the main I-T offices in the national capital located at the Civic Centre near Ajmeri Gate. “Most of the people have been able to file their returns till July 31st... during the five-day extension period an average turnout of only about 100-150 people a day have been noticed,” an official said. “Out of these 100150-odd assesses, most head-out to our online filing assistance desk and very few actually submit the physical form,” the official said. “The major rush now a days is for the online submission.

In Chennai, filing of income tax returns was going on smoothly at the special counters set up at the Income Tax office on Saturday, with no technical or other glitches reported so far.

Kolkata too did not report any extraordinary rush to file ITRs on the last day. “After the extension of last date, we did not find any extraordinary rush. Till now, about 500 income tax returns have been filed since morning. Around 27,000 paper returns were submitted here till July 31. In the five-day extension period, additional 2000 returns have so far been filed here,” a tax official at Kolkata's Bamboo Villa I-T department office said.

A Kolkata-based tax professional S. Mitra said: “The online portal of the I-T department had some technical glitches before the earlier deadline of July 31. We were finding difficulties in uploading our clients' annual statements on the website.

The problem, has been eased out to a large extent but, the website still remains slow.” In Mumbai, the filing of IT returns have continued smoothly since the past five days and on the last date of the extended deadline, which ended here on Saturday. During the period between November 9, 2017, till March 31, 2017, 1.96 crore returns were filed, as compared to 1.63 crore returns filed during corresponding period of 2015-16.