 "audit")
More than three million audit reports, including approximately 2.95 million tax audit reports, have been successfully filed for Assessment Year 2023-24 on the Income Tax Department's e-filing portal, as of September 30. These reports, encompassing forms such as 29B, 29C, and 10CCB, were filed within the stipulated time, ensuring timely compliance, stated the release by the Ministry of Finance.
To aid the taxpayers, extensive outreach programmes were conducted, totalling around 5.54 million outreaches through emails, SMSs, and social media. Information messages were disseminated on the Income Tax portal, accompanied by user awareness videos to guide taxpayers and tax professionals through the filing process. These efforts significantly contributed to increasing awareness and facilitating timely submissions.
Digitisation of the filing process has allowed efficient management of high traffic, providing taxpayers and professionals with a seamless filing experience.
The e-filing Helpdesk team also reportedly addressed approximately 236,000 queries from taxpayers during September 2023. The support provided included inbound and outbound calls, live chats, Webex sessions, and co-browsing sessions. Moreover, the team proactively resolved queries received on the Department's Twitter handle through online response management, ensuring near real-time assistance to taxpayers and stakeholders. Additionally, informative webinars were conducted to guide tax professionals specifically on filing audit forms.
E-filing of tax returns is still open as the government extended the deadline from September 30 to November 30 for companies.
Also, the due date for furnishing audit reports by companies who need to get their accounts audited was extended by one month, until October 31.
