Tax experts and chartered accountants (CAs) across the country have been working round-the-clock to meet the 30 September due date for filing tax audit reports.
There are as many as 30 writ petitions filed in different high courts across the country requesting an order to extend the due date. So far, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has not come up with an extension.
Meanwhile, the All India Federation of Tax Practitioners (AIFTP) has also requested the CBDT to extend the due date for tax audit reports to 31 October, PTI reported .
“When the tax filing deadline was shifted from 31 July to 15 September, all professionals who generally work for two months for the audit are now made to wrap up everything in 15 days. Everybody was expecting an extension, but it has not come as yet. Given the glitches on the I-T portal and late release of tax forms, the return filing work was delayed beyond what was expected,” says CA Chirag Chauhan, founder of CA Chauhan & Company.
High court order brings relief
The Rajasthan High Court’s Jodhpur bench has, meanwhile, ordered the government and CBDT to extend the tax audit report due date from 30 September to 31 October. The next hearing will be on 27 October, reported ET.
Notably, the regular deadline to file the income tax return every year is 31 July, which this year was extended to 15 September after most ITR forms were released quite late. Although online utilities of ITR-1 and ITR-4 were released on 4 June, some ITR forms were released quite late in late July and early August.
ITR filing deadline
To make matters worse, the e-filing website faced multiple glitches in the run-up to the revised due date of 15 September. The glitches had become so acute that the revised deadline had to be pushed back one day to 16 September.
Meanwhile, some tax experts are running online campaigns to mobilise social media users to push the authorities to extend the tax audit deadline. For instance, CA Chirag Chauhan started a campaign with the hashtag ‘PenDownNoExtensionNoAudit’, which has received nearly 9,000 posts so far.
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