Why has the government once again postponed the last date for filing of tax returns for fiscal year 2019-20?

The tax filing deadline for the fiscal year 2019-20 was to expire on 31 December but at the last moment the government has acceded to the demands of most of the auditors and trade bodies to postpone the tax filing date. CBDT extended the last date for individuals by 10 days and for other categories of filers between 15 days and 1 month.

However, a chunk of the filings have already been done. In fact, the IT department has confirmed that as of 29-Dec, over 4.54 crore tax returns for FY2019-20 had already been filed. This is slightly lower than 4.77 crore returns filed on comparable date in FY2018-19 but that was expected considering that the COVID pandemic would have some impact.

In terms of break-up of the statistics, out of the 4.54 crore tax returns filed, nearly 2.52 crore were ITR-1 returns, which is the most basic form of Sahaj returns. The ITR-4 returns for FY2019-20 were above 1 crore; which is higher than last year. However, the takeaway is that while individual filings were down, business filings of returns were actually up this year.