The New Form 26 AS promotes voluntary compliance and easy e-filing of returns.

From this assessment year, Form 26 AS gets revised that is effective from, June 1, which eased the return filing process for the individual assessees and promoted voluntary compliance. The new form provides additional information about the Specified High Valued Financial Transactions (SFTs), payment of taxes, demand/refund and pending/completed proceedings undertaken by a taxpayer in a particular financial transaction.

This New Form has introduced more transparency and answerability in the tax administration process and also increased the tax accountability on behalf of the assessees and cautiously simplified the process of calculating the correct tax liability while e-filing of returns.

The taxpayers can access Form 26 AS which is a consolidated tax statement from the income tax website by using their permanent account number (PAN) which earlier provided only the details of Tax deducted at source (TDS) and Tax collected at source (TCS) other than additional information about the details of other taxes paid and refund proceeds and TDS defaults.

The newly added information will be in Part E of Form 26 AS and will include date and type of transactions like party transactions, amount, number of parties, mode of payments, and also information about cash deposit or withdrawal from a savings bank account, sale or purchase of immovable property, time deposits, credit card payments, purchase of shares, mutual funds and buyback of shares from ‘specified persons’ like banks, mutual funds, institutions issuing bonds and registrars or sub-registrars for the individual having high valued transactions.

CBDT further said that these changes will be beneficial for the honest taxpayers who have updated their financial transactions while filing the returns and desist those who try to conceal information of financial transactions in their returns.