On 15 September 2025, The Chamber of Tax Consultants submitted a representation to the Finance Minister and CBDT requesting a 15-day extension of the due date for filing income-tax returns falling due on that day. The Chamber, a professional body of tax practitioners, acknowledged the earlier extension granted from 31 July to 15 September but highlighted continuing challenges faced by taxpayers and consultants. Members reported persistent technical issues on the income-tax e-filing portal in recent days, including delays in login and access, failures in self-assessment and advance tax payment processing, non-generation of challans, abrupt session expiries, and OTP delays causing verification problems. Errors in JSON files, incorrect validation messages in Form 10-IEA, difficulties in downloading AIS and TIS, and data mismatches were also cited. According to the representation, these glitches have significantly slowed the filing process, causing hardship for taxpayers, especially where large self-assessment liabilities or loss carry-forward claims are involved.
The Chamber emphasised that the difficulties are due to systemic shortcomings beyond taxpayers’ control and argued that denying additional time would unfairly penalise compliant taxpayers attempting to meet statutory deadlines. It urged the authorities to extend the deadline until 30 September 2025, allowing sufficient time to complete return filing smoothly. The request was framed as a practical step to address technical bottlenecks and ensure that compliance efforts are not frustrated by portal inefficiencies.
THE CHAMBER TAX CONSULTANTS
15th September, 2025
To,
1. Nirmala Sitharaman,
Hon’ble Finance Minister of India
North Block, New Delhi – 110 001
2. Shri Ravi Agarwal,
Hon’ble Chairman,
Central Board of Direct Taxes, North Block,
Delhi – 110 001
Sub : Request for extension of due date for filing returns falling on 15th September, 2025 by fifteen days.
Respected Madam / Sir,
The Chamber of Tax Consultants, established in 1926, is one of the oldest non-profit organizations of tax practitioners, having Advocates, Chartered Accountants and Tax Practitioners as its members spread across Pan India. The Chamber is presently in its centenary year which has commenced from July 2025. Many senior tax professionals who regularly appear before the Supreme Court, High Courts and Income-tax Appellate Tribunals are its Past Presidents. The Chamber has been making regular representations before various government agencies.
The Chamber regularly takes up initiatives to act as a bridge between stakeholders and concerned regulatory bodies in order to convey and help in resolving genuine grievances or effectively implement the laws.
Request for extension of due date for filing Income-tax Returns
At the outset, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Finance Ministry and the Central Board of Direct Taxes for their pro-active approach in recognising the need for an extension to file the Return of Income for assessee who are not subjected to Audit. The Board timely understood the genuine difficulty being faced this year due to various factors and has extended the due date for filing the Return of Income from 31st July, 2025 to 15th September, 2025. This extension of time was very much necessary considering the fact that there are many statutory changes in the Income-tax Act and also corresponding changes are necessary in the Income-tax Return Forms.
While the extension of time has been helpful in addressing the challenges for filing the Returns in respect of the assessee who is not subjected to any audit under the statute, we also find that the process of filing the Return of Income for non-audit cases is still cumbersome and time consuming. Further, to the same in last 4-5 days following technical glitches are faced by our members and taxpayers which are informed to us and therefore we are making this urgent representation for extension of due dates. We would like to draw your kind attention on the following difficulties which are faced by many of our members and also the tax-payers at large in last few days :
1. Extensive time taken for accessing the portal for filing return. The time taken for logging in the portal is substantially higher as compared to normal situations. At times, it is seen that the assessee is not able to log in despite of multiple efforts.
2. Taxpayers are not able to make Self-assessment tax payments and/or after payments challans are not generated for 12 to 24 hours. Payment of self-assessment tax for AY 2025-26 and also the Advance Tax for AY 2026-27 which falls due on today is also not happening smoothly and many a times the website automatically logs out while the payment is still pending. Also it has been observed that the amounts paid are though debited from the bank account, the website does not provide for download of the paid challan and the paid challan is not reflected in challan history for very long period of time.
3. Sessions are getting expired in an abrupt manner. This creates lots of difficulty due to the fact that the person will need to re-login and the work done earlier gets lost. Abruptly sessions are getting expired compelling users to redo substantial work again.
4. Considerable delay in receiving OTPs for verification of returns. This also takes disproportionate time and the OTPs get expired before they are received by the user.
5. Portal is showing some or other errors in the JSON files generated which are in fact not actually in existence. This delays the verification while filing the Returns and also results in multiple efforts for being able to verify the returns while filing.
6. During filing of Form 10-IEA, even after filling up correct OTP, its showing “please enter valid values”
7. Taxpayers and consultants are not able to download AIS and TIS from Portal. The data contained in the AIS and TIS forms are also not free from mistakes. There are duplicate entries and also some of the fields are not available. This leads to situation where matching of the data is not satisfactory and the assessee is worried about the repercussions that can follow due to mismatch of data.
8. Overall speed of portal is very slow and returns are not getting uploaded for last few hours or Taxpayers are even not able to access their e-filing account.
Our Humble Request
In light of the above, we feel that it will be appropriate to provide sufficient and reasonable time to Taxpayers who are trying to file their returns in last few days and are not able to do it
because of various technical glitches of portal as stated above. Specially, it would be tremendous hardship for Taxpayers in whose case, large self-assessment tax or carry forward of losses are involved.
We sincerely request you to appreciate the difficulties faced by the tax-payers and extend the due date for filing returns falling due on today by another fifteen days to 30th September, 2025. You will appreciate the fact that our request is solely for the reason of the shortcomings in the portal for which the assessee cannot be faulted.
We trust that your esteemed office will consider this request with empathy and pragmatism to our request.
Yours Sincerely,
For THE CHAMBER OF TAX CONSULTANTS
Sd/–
Jayant Gokhale
President
Sd/-
Ketan Vajani
Chairman
Law and Representation Committee
Sd/–
Hitesh Shah
Co-Chairman
