Arjuna (Fictional Character): Krishna, The Income Tax department will launch a new ‘taxpayer friendly’ income tax e-filing portal which will be operational from 7 June 2021. What is an e-filing portal?
Krishna, (Fictional Character): Arjuna, The e-filing portal is used by the taxpayers to file their income tax returns, forms, appeals, and also to raise complaints seeking refunds and other works with the tax department.The department uses it to issue notices, get responses from the taxpayer and respond to their queries and communicate final orders like assessments, appeals, exemption, and penalties, among others.
Arjuna: Krishna, what are the features of the new income tax e-filing portal?
Krishna: Arjuna, some of the important features are as follows:
1]The new taxpayer-friendly portal shall be integrated with the immediate processing of Income Tax Returns (ITRs). It will result in the issue of quick refunds to taxpayers.
2] All interactions and uploads or pending actions will be displayed on a single dashboard. This will help the taxpayer to monitor and take appropriate action.
3] Free of cost ITR preparation software available offline and online with interactive questions and pre-filing. It will assist the taxpayers to file ITR even without any tax knowledge and reduce data entry effort.
4] New call center with FAQs, Tutorials, Videos, Chatbot/live agent, etc. which will provide rapid response to taxpayer’s queries.
5] All key portal functions on the desktop will be available on the mobile app which will be enabled subsequently for full access on the mobile network. Thus, a desktop or laptop will not be necessary for making compliances.
6] New online tax payment system on the new portal will be enabled subsequently with multiple new payment options such as net banking, UPI, RTGS, NEFT, and other modes. Due to this, there will be no requirement of generating the challan and the payment will be automatically updated on the system immediately.
Arjuna: Krishna, what preparations have been made for the launch of the new portal?
Krishna: Arjuna, in preparation for this launch and migration activities, the existing portal of the department at www.incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in was not available from 1st June to 6th June 2021. Further, directions have been issued to fix the hearing of cases or compliances only from 10 June 2021 onwards, to give taxpayers time to respond to the new system.
Arjuna: Krishna, what will be the impact of the new portal?
Krishna: Arjuna, the new e-filing portal www.incometax.gov.in is aimed to give ease, a modern and smooth interface to taxpayers. It is another initiative for providing ease of compliance to taxpayers and other stakeholders. But patients should be kept during the switch over to the new filing portal and the subsequent teething problems.
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1. For adding a bank acct in the new portal, assesse has to give mobile no and e mail ID, unlike the old portal. Removing the bank acct button cannot be found. For removing, one has to validate the bank acct before removing. What is the necessity of this?AAAdding and deleting bank acct in the old portal was simple and easy.