Income Tax E-Assessment

What is the e-assessment in Income Tax?

The Ministry of Finance has introduced an e-assessment scheme to conduct the assessments through an online and faceless process to evaluate the income tax returns. This scheme is applied to all the regional and national centres, so it does not require the taxpayers to physically appear in the Department of Income Tax.

The scheme was introduced on 12th September 2019. The scheme of e-assessment is monitored by the National e-assessment Centres (NEC) for verification and modification purposes. It also assigns the cases randomly to the assessment officers.

The format of the e-assessment scheme is that all the assessors have to upload the documents online through the portal. The old format of providing the documents to the offices and in person does not exist anymore.

Objectives of the e-assessment scheme

The different objectives of the e-assessment scheme are as follows:

• It is used to remove any type of human interference from the assessment procedure of income tax.
• It creates a digital platform for a totally anonymous online process.
• It reviews the income tax returns by creating the specified assessment units with the help of an automated allocation system.
• It also eliminates the need to appear physically in the income tax department for the verification of documents.

Reasons for e-assessment from ITD

According to the laws of the Income Tax Department, 1961, the assessments are conducted to find out the errors and omissions of the ITRs. Here are a few of the reasons for which scrutiny from the ITD is conducted:

• Irregular levels of Income
• People are failing to file their income tax returns.
• Mismatch in the payments of income tax of the taxpayers
• There are some contradictions in the value of transactions.
• Discrepancy found in the credits of TDS