58.3 mn income tax returns filed till July 31, record 7.24 mn on last day

Over the last two financial years, the govt had extended the deadline for filing ITRs to ease compliance for taxpayers battling pandemic. But this year the deadline was not extended by even by a day

A record 72.42 lakh income tax returns were filed on the last day of such filing on July 31, taking the cumulative returns to 5.83 crore, near to the same levels of last year.

While initially income tax return (ITR) filing was slow, the pace picked up as the deadline neared.

"The surge of filing ITRs peaked on July 31, 2022 (due date for salaried taxpayers and other non-tax audit cases) with over 72.42 lakh ITRs being filed on a single day," an official statement said.

The total ITRs filed till July 31, 2022 for assessment year 22-23 is about 5.83 crore, it said.

Last fiscal (2020-21), about 5.89 crore ITRs (Income Tax Returns) were filed by the extended due date of December 31, 2021.

Typically, return filers wait till the last day to file returns.

Over the last two financial years, the government had extended the deadline for filing ITRs to ease compliance for taxpayers battling Covid pandemic. But this year the deadline was not extended by even by a day.

Through ITR, a person is supposed to submit to the Income Tax Department information about the income and the taxes due and paid on it during the year.

The Income Tax Department has prescribed 7 types of ITR forms, whose applicability will depend on the nature and amount of income and the type of taxpayer.

The tax department's new income tax filing portal is now very robust to take the increased loads.

"The e-filing portal also set other benchmarks 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 to 6 PM," the statement said.

The initial pace of e-filing was relatively much slower with the first 1 crore ITRs for AY 22-23 being filed only by July 7. The pace picked up marginally, with about 2.48 crore ITRs being filed by July 22.

"With the Government announcing that there would be no extension of the due date, there was a surge in filing of ITRs and by July 25, 2022, 3 crore ITRs had been filed. By the end of the day on 31st July,2022, 72.42 lakh ITRs had been filed, shattering all previous records (maximum being 49 lakh ITRs in 2019). In the month of July, 2022 alone, over 5.13 crore ITRs have been filed," it said.

Out of 5.83 crore ITRs filed for AY 2022-23, 50 per cent of these are ITR-1 (2.93 crore), 11.5 per cent are ITR-2 (67 lakh), 10.9 per cent are ITR-3 (63.35 lakh) and 26 per cent are ITR-4 (1.54 crore).

"The number of ITRs filed during working hours (9 AM-6 PM) since 7th July, 2022 to 31st July, 2022 is around 3.31 crore, which is 58.77% of the total ITRs filed," it said.

"Over 47% of these ITRs have been filed using the online ITR form on the portal and the balance have been uploaded using the ITR created from the offline software utilities."

Large number of taxpayers did their due diligence by comparing data of their income by viewing their Annual Information Statement (AIS) and Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS). A high rate of usage of AIS/TIS data was reflected by the fact that more than 5.03 crore taxpayers viewed/downloaded their AIS.

This year a large portion of the data for ITR-1 was already prefilled with salary, interest and dividend income making compliance easier for taxpayers. For other ITRs 2, 3, 4, apart from this data, property details for rental income, brought forward losses, MAT credit was also pre-filled to further ease compliance for taxpayers.