Online tax forms may soon be pre-filled...

The move is part of the tax authority’s efforts to use technology and reduce human interface and lesser discretion at the level of officials. It also shows the intensive data gathering the department does from third parties to profile tax-payers and reduce the risk of tax evasion.

Chandra said that even now, there is no discretion in selecting cases for scrutiny. The department has managed to limit cases taken up for scrutiny to less than 0.5% of all returns filed. “This year, a large number of cases were chosen for e-assessment. So far, 70,000 cases were assessed electronically without calling the assesses to offices,” Chandra said at an international tax conference organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Within a year, CBDT will start issuing E-PAN within four hours, he added.taxpayers can file returns for 2017-18 till March 2019 with a fine. If filed after the August 31 deadline but before the end of December, the fine is ₹5,000, which will double if filed afterwards till March 2019. The number of tax returns filed by corporate entities have also gone up to 800,000 so far this year, compared to 700,000 in the year-ago period, Chandra said.

So far this year, the department has collected nearly half of its full year revenue target of ₹11.5 trillion, Chandra said.

Experts said pre-filling the forms will make life easier for small tax payers. “About 80-90% tax payers have only salary income and very few have other sources of income. Offering prefilled income tax return forms will increase compliance and lessen the burden on small tax payers,” said tax expert Abhishek Goenka.

Those who do not have any other sources of income, therefore, may not need to hire services of a tax professional for filing returns. As per data available with the tax department, the largest number of tax return filers—13.8 million --are in the annual income bracket of ₹2.5 lakh to ₹3.5 lakh.