Linking PAN with Aadhaar: CBDT chairperson says 480 mn linked so far

About 48 crore individual Permanent Account Numbers (PANs), out of the total 61 crore issued till now, have been linked with Aadhaar till date and those who do not link it by the declared deadline of March 31 will not get benefits while undertaking various business and tax-related activities, CBDT Chairperson Nitin Gupta said.

The government has made the linkage of the two databases mandatory and declared that those individual PANs that are not attached to the Aadhaar by the end of this financial year (March 31, 2023) will be rendered inoperative.

A fee of Rs 1,000 will be payable for those who want to link their PAN and Aadhaar between now and March 31.

"There are about 61 crore individual PANs issued till now and out of this, around 48 crore have been seeded with Aadhaar. The difference is around 13 crore now, including the exempt category, and we hope the rest will also be linked by the end date," Gupta told PTI in a post-Budget interview.

We have undertaken a number of public campaigns and have extended the deadline many times urging taxpayers to link the two...those category of taxpayers who are required to do so but do not link them, will stand to lose tax benefits as their PANs will not be valid after March, he said.

The CBDT chief said the Budget announcement of making PAN a "common identifier" will be "beneficial" for the business sector.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech made on February 1, had said that PAN will now be a common identifier for business establishments for digital systems of government agencies.

A circular issued by the CBDT on March 30 said once a PAN becomes inoperative, an individual shall be liable to all the consequences under the Act (I-T Act) and will have to suffer a number of implications like:

The person shall not be able to file return using the inoperative PAN; pending returns will not be processed; pending refunds cannot be issued to inoperative PANs; pending proceedings as in the case of defective returns cannot be completed once the PAN is inoperative and tax will be required to be deducted at a higher rate.

"In addition to the above, the tax payer might face difficulty at various other fora like banks and other financial portals, as PAN is one of the important KYC (know your customer) criterion for all kinds of financial transaction," the circular said.

Few categories of taxpayers are, however, exempted from undertaking this linkage.

The 'exempt category', according to notification issued by the Union finance ministry in May 2017, are those individuals residing in the states/UTs of Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya; a non-resident as per the Income-tax Act, 1961; of the age of eighty years or more at any time during the previous year and a person not a citizen of India.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) frames policy for the I-T department.

While Aadhaar is issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to a resident of India, PAN is a 10-digit alphanumeric number allotted by the IT Department to a person, firm or entity.