On the last day of tax filing, a new record was established when 72.42 million income tax returns were submitted, bringing the total to 5.83 million, near to last year’s levels. While ITR filing was initially sluggish, it picked up as the deadline approached.
“On July 31, 2022 (the due date for salaried taxpayers and other non-tax audit cases), over 72.42 lakh ITRs were filed on a single day,” reads an official statement.
It added that, as of July 31, 2022, the government has received 5.83 crore ITRs for assessment year 22-23. In the last financial year (2020-21), over 5.89 crore ITRs were filed after the extended due date of December 31, 2021.
Return filers generally wait till the last day to submit tax documents.
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The Indian government has extended the deadline for filing income tax returns four times since 2014 to help taxpayers struggling with Covid pandemic comply. However, this year’s deadline was not extended by even a single day.
The ITR is an annual tax return that must be submitted to the Income Tax Department by a person who is resident in India. A taxpayer must submit information about their income and taxes owing and paid on it during the year via ITR.
There are seven types of income tax returns that the Income Tax Department requires, depending on the type and amount of income, as well as the taxpayer.
The new income tax filing portal from the tax department has now gotten very powerful to handle the heavier loads.
The e-filing portal also set new standards on July 31, 2022, including — highest per second rate of ITR filing: 570 (at 4:29:30 pm), highest per minute rate of ITR filing: 9573 (at 7:44 pm), and the highest per hour rate of ITR filing: 5,17,030 (between 5 PM and 6 PM). nThe initial pace of e-filing was quite sluggish; only 1 crore AY 22-23 ITRs were filed by July 7. With a little more than 2.48 crore ITRs being submitted between July 22 and August 8, the momentum picked up somewhat.
Out of 5.83 crore ITRs filed for FY 2022-23, 50% are ITR-1 (2.93 crore), 11.5% are ITR-2 (67 lakh), 10.9% are ITR-3 (63.35 lakh) and 26% are ITR-4 (1.54 crore). The most common type is ITR 1, with 2.93 million registrations; followed by ITR 2, with 67 million registrations; then there’s ITR 3, with 63.35 million registrations; and lastly there’s ITRY 4, with 1.54 million registrations.
The number of ITRs submitted during working hours (9 AM to 6 PM) between July 7, 2022, and July 31, 2022 was about 3.31 million, which is 58.77% of the total ITRs filed, according to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
“Over 47 percent of these ITRs were submitted on the portal using the online ITR form, while the rest have been submitted on the basis of offline software utilities.” The vast majority of taxpayers did their homework by comparing their income data in order to understand why they would be getting a notice from HMRC, which some missed and sent them a new one.
The high rate of AIS/TIS usage was evident in the fact that 5.03 crore people viewed or downloaded their data. This year, a large number of the data for ITR-1 was prefilled with salary, interest, and dividend income, making compliance easier for taxpayers. Apart from this information, property details for rental income were also pre-filled to make accounting more straightforward for individuals.
