54% tax payers yet to file ITR; 37% say difficult to do so by deadline: Survey
Due date to file ITR (AY 2022-23) for salaried taxpayers and non-auditable cases is July 31, 2022. So far, more than 2 crore income tax returns (ITRs) for the AY 2022–23 have been submitted via the income tax e-filing system, as per an Income Tax Department tweet.
A LocalCircle report reveals that more than 50% of people who must file income tax returns (ITR) for the fiscal year 2021–2022 by July 31 have not yet done so.
According to the report, “So far 54 percent of the respondents are yet to comply with the requirement to file tax returns by this month’s end, of which 37 percent remain uncertain if they will be able to meet the deadline. Just 46 percent of the taxpayers had filed their returns at the time of the taxpayers had filed their returns at the time of the LocalCircles survey.”
In the previous two years, the government extended ITR filing and other income tax-related deadlines due to the Covid pandemic and glitches in the newly launched income tax portal. On July 2, 2022, the income tax department tweeted on its official Twitter handle about the irregular traffic on its e-filing website due to problems being faced by the taxpayers. The tweet stated: “It has been noticed that taxpayers are facing issues in accessing ITD e-filing portal.”
According to the Income tax tweet on July 2, “It has been noticed that taxpayers are facing issues in accessing ITD e-filing portal. As informed by Infosys, they have observed some irregular traffic on the portal for which proactive measures are being taken. Some users may be inconvenienced, which is regretted.”
The tweet suggests that the new tax portal is still experiencing technical issues a year after its implementation. These include issues where taxpayers are unable to connect into their accounts or view previous ITR data, etc. The authorities have not yet made any indication that they intend to extend the deadline, as many taxpayers had hoped.
Survey Demographics
Over 11,000 responses were received from citizens across 306 districts of India. 69% of the respondents were men while 31% were women. 44% of the citizens were from metros or tier 1 districts, 33% from tier 2 districts and 23% from tier 3, 4 and rural districts. The survey was conducted via LocalCircles platform and all participants are validated citizens who had to be registered with LocalCircles to participate in this survey.
