In a relief to small and salaried class taxpayer category, as per the provisions introduced in the latest Finance Bill, the taxman will not issue demand notice for minor mismatch in income tax return filed and corresponding tax credit data extracted from banks and other financial institutions by the department.

As quoted in the PTI report, CBDT Chairman Sushil Chandra said, "A policy decision has been made not to issue tax demand notices in case of minor mismatch in these instances. We trust the taxpayer and the step is aimed to make easy the processing of income tax returns".

There have been instances where small discrepancies are brought forth due to difference in information of Form-16 which is furnished by the employer and Form 26AS i.e. the tax credit statement provided by the department of Income Tax.

The new policy measure will be brought into practice in respect of any return filed for the assessment year 2018-19 that begins from April 1, 2018. Until now, such demand notices were issued by the Bengaluru-based central processing centre (CPC) of the Income tax department.

In an explanation to the withdrawal of the earlier regime of issuance of demand notices for such mismatches, one of the tax official is quoted as saying "There could be genuine reasons for such mis-matches and hence it was decided to change the existing procedure in this context".

With Inputs From PTI