Income tax filing: Last minute mistakes to avoid and details to check when filing your income tax returns

livemint.com:

The last date to file your Income Tax Returns (ITR) for the financial year 2023-24 is fast approaching on 31 July, and if you haven't completed the exercise yet, you are cutting it rather close. 

Filing your taxes at the last-minute could lead you to miss out on disclosing some transactions or failing to gather all the required documents on time. For instance, if you invest in cryptocurrency, you have to disclose those transactions scrip-wise. 

Karan Batra, founder of Charteredclub.com, said crypto exchanges don’t have a standard format for statements, which means each transaction has to be entered manually. “P&Ls (profit and loss) of crypto transactions are not refined, unlike stocks. Declaring these needs extra caution."

Second, there are some mandatory disclosures that need exhaustive information. Schedule FA (foreign assets) and AL (assets and liabilities) are two such requirements. Schedule FA asks for the asset’s acquisition cost, present value, peak value in the year, address and corresponding income, if any.

Similarly, Schedule AL asks for the cost of all assets and outstanding loans used to acquire those assets, from taxpayers with incomes above ₹50 lakh. Gathering all such information on different assets to declare it correctly can be time consuming.

By filing your tax returns at the last minute, you also run the risk of missing the deadline if Form 26AS or Form 16 are erroneous, and you can’t get the incorrect information rectified in time.

In any case, tax experts advise against missing the due date, not only because it attracts a penalty, but also because it has far reaching consequences for taxpayers who have opted for the old tax regime at the beginning of the financial year.

Taxpayers get time till 31