Easy Guide to New Draft Common ITR Form for Helping Assessee

What is a New Common ITR Form?

A common ITR via combining all the forms of income return excluding ITR-7 shall be proposed by the Income tax department. CBDT intends to have a single ITR filing form when taxpayers will log in to file their ITR on the portal then they will see one ITR form. This is called the Common ITR Form. A new feature called Wizard has been added to this common ITR form.

In the start, some queries will be asked in the form and the assessee will have to answer Yes or No to them. The widget in which you will mark yes, that particular option (utility) will remain open. If not, the options that are not for you will not be visible. More than 40 such queries will be in the form.

Who Can File the Common ITR Form?

Currently, the assessee would be needed to file their income tax returns in ITR-1 to ITR-7 as per the kind of person and the income type. ITR-7 would be applied to charitable institutions, business trusts, investment funds, and others.

The current ITR-1 and ITR-4 will be maintained. The same would be provided with the choice to these assessees for filing the return either in the existing form ITR-1 or ITR-4 or the proposed common Income tax return at their convenience.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has invited stakeholder comments by 15 December on the proposed new common ITR form, which will be available to all taxpayers except trusts and non-profit organizations.

Scheme of the Proposed New Common ITR

• Basic data (including parts A to E), scheduled for calculating the total income (Schedule TI), scheduled for c (schedule TTI), information on bank accounts, and a schedule for the tax payments (schedule TXP) would be subjected to be applied for all assessee.
• The income tax return would be customized for the assessee with the subject schedules according to the questions to which the assessee replied (wizard questions).
• The question has been prepared in a way and order that when the answer to any question would be no there shall be no additional questions associated with the same question does not get represented to the assessee.
• For return filing, the guidelines have been added that comprise the assistance for the applicable schedules.
• The said ITR has been made in a way that each row comprises one different value. The same would ease the return filing.
• The facility for filing ITR shall be initiated in a way that merely the subjected fields of the schedule shall be seen and wherever required the set of fields would be displayed more than once.

Will the Common ITR Make Work Easier for Taxpayers?

A number of relevant details have been auto-populated into the ITR for taxpayers’ convenience. There have been recent announcements regarding a common ITR, but the extent to which this process will facilitate filing compliance will not be known until the government utility is released by the income tax department. Taxpayers may benefit from facilitating the text of disclosure prerequisites on income tax return forms, e.g. by using such examples that can be understood by a common man who doesn’t understand income tax section numbers.

Advantages of the New Common ITR Form

• Under the current ITR forms the assesses are needed to choose the right ITR form which would be applicable to them as per the income heads and the earned income. For stopping the problem and preventing confusion for the assessee, the common ITR form would be available for all the assessee (with the exception of ITR 7) and make compliance easier.
• When the assessee replies to the questions the facility shall get customized and merely the applicable schedules for the questions that have been answered with YES shall get displayed.
• Instructions would get summed which consist of the directions concerning the applicable schedules to help in ITR filing.
• The same shall indeed ease the scope of pre-filing through the reconciliation of the 3rd party data available with the tax department related to the data which is to be reported in the ITR, to confirm that all the income sources would be reported via assessee and make the compliance earlier for the assessee.
• Since it is the draft Common ITR Form that CBDT has proposed there might be some revisions when the final form is introduced to filing the tax, upon input receipt from stakeholders and the public.

FAQs on the New Common ITR Form