“Have you filed your taxes yet?” – a common question this time of year, as taxpayers prepare to file their tax returns before the July 31 deadline. Yet the struggle is annual and often postponed until the last minute.
According to the Income Tax Department, only 4 million returns have been filed as of July 22. It is not just procrastination, but taxpayers also seem to be grappling with issues like login failures, unresponsive pages, timeouts, and problems in reflecting pre-populated data and uploading large files.
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According to a survey conducted by LocalCircles that received 38,000 responses from 311 districts, 49% of the taxpayers surveyed have not yet filed their returns, while 29% do not think they would be able to meet the deadline.
According to the survey, 43% of respondents came from tier 1 districts, 26% from tier 2 districts and 31% from tier 3 and 4 districts.
When asked, “How positioned are you to be able to file your 2023-24 personal income tax returns by the current deadline of July 31, 2024?”, 48% said they had already filed, while 4% said they had tried but encountered difficulties and would try on July 31. Of the 19,865 respondents, 16% said they had not yet filed and were confident they would easily meet the deadline, while 18% said they had not yet filed and said it would take “considerable effort” to meet the deadline, 11% said it would be impossible to file by the deadline, and 2% did not provide a clear answer.
In summary, 49% of respondents have not yet filed their returns, while 29% believe that it would be difficult to meet the ITR deadline of July 31.
When asked what were the hurdles taxpayers faced, some of the 18,139 respondents cited more than one reason. Among the respondents, 38 per cent said the functioning of the tax filing portal – directly or indirectly – was a problem. Thirty-eight per cent said time was a constraint, while 14 per cent said they were still receiving Form 16 and other documents.
Up to 14% of respondents indicated that their board was experiencing difficulties, while 3% reported not being able to spend time with their board. Up to 14% mentioned “other problems”.