Last updated: February 05, 2023, 3:23 PM IST
A fee of Rs 1,000 is due for those who wish to link their PAN and Aadhaar between now and March 31.
The government has stated that the individual PANs that are not linked to the Aadhaar at the end of this fiscal year (March 31, 2023) will be inactivated.
About 48 crore individual permanent account numbers (PANs), out of a total of 61 crore issued so far, have been linked to Aadhaar till date and those who fail to link it before the stated deadline of March 31st will not get any benefits while executing of various business and tax-related activities, said CBDT Chairman Nitin Gupta.
The government has mandated the linking of the two databases and stated that the individual PANs not linked to the Aadhaar at the end of this fiscal year (March 31, 2023) will be decommissioned.
A fee of Rs 1,000 is due for those who wish to link their PAN and Aadhaar between now and March 31.
“Approximately 61 crore individual PANs have been issued so far and of those, about 48 crore have been seeded with Aadhaar. The difference is now around 13 crore, including the exempt category, and we hope that the rest will also be pegged by the end date,” Gupta told PTI in a post-Budget interview.
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We have run a number of publicity campaigns and have extended the deadline many times urging taxpayers to link the two… that class of taxpayers who are required to do so but do not link them will lose tax benefits because their PANs will not become valid after March, he said.
The CBDT chief said the budget announcement to make PAN a “common identifier” will be “beneficial” for business.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said in her February 1 budget speech 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 that once a PAN is inactivated, a person will be liable for all consequences under the law (IT law) and will have to face a number of implications such as: The person will not be in be able to file return using the non-working PAN; pending returns will not be processed; pending refunds cannot be issued to non-operating PANs; pending procedures, such as in the case of deficient returns, cannot be completed once the PAN is out of action and taxes must be withheld at a higher rate.
“In addition to the above, the taxpayer may face difficulties in various other forums such as banks and other financial portals as PAN is one of the important KYC (know your customer) criteria for all types of financial transactions,” the circular said.
However, few categories of taxpayers are exempt from this link.
The ‘exempt category’, as per the notification issued by the Ministry of Finance of the Union in May 2017, are those persons residing in the States/UTs of Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and Meghalaya; a non-resident under the Income Tax Act, 1961; of the age of eighty years or older at any time in the previous year and a person who is not a citizen of India.
The Central Council for Direct Taxes (CBDT) determines the policy for the IT 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 assigned by the IT department to an individual, company or entity.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and was published from a syndicated news agency feed)
