In a recent order, Income-Tax Appellate Tribunal’s (ITAT) Mumbai bench dismissed the penalty, income tax officials had levied on salaried employees for ‘concealment of income’, reports a leading daily.

This comes into light when an online tax-return filing portal had underreported salary income during a taxpayer’s income tax return owing to a glitch. The I-T officials had treated this as concealment of income and levied taxes on the taxpayer.ITAT bench examined all the facts produced by the taxpayer and further dismissed the penalty as there was no intention of evading taxes or claiming dubious refunds by the taxpayer, says the report. 

This new order is said to be friendly for the taxpayer and claims that an online tax-return filing portal’s negligence cannot be the ground for penalising a salaried taxpayer. On the other hand, this new order does not have a blanket application on cases where income has been reported incorrectly.

According to the ITAT, income tax officials have a database which has all the details of the taxpayer’s salary due to quarterly returns of TDS filed. Form 16 which is filed by the employer also contains salary and TDS details. This makes it difficult for a salaried taxpayer to evade taxes by concealment of the actual salary, says the report.

A senior tax official quoted in the report suggests that as a taxpayer, we must check the contents of the income tax return being filed by an e-portal.

Currently, Taxpayers with over Rs 5 lakh income have to file their return online. According to finance ministry statistics, in 2015-16, around 4.34 crore income tax returns were filed through an electronic medium which is a rise of nearly 27% from the previous year. #casansaar (LiveMint)