The amount earned from salary can be seen in Form 16, whereas Form 16A is seen to know the interest earned from fixed deposits. TDS is deducted on these earnings. But if TDS is not deducted then it is almost difficult to get such information.
The Income Tax Department said on Sunday that taxpayers can now download the new Annual Information Statement (AIS) on the e-filing portal, which includes details of interest, dividend, security and mutual fund transactions and money received from abroad. The IT department last month expanded the list of high value transactions that will be available to taxpayers in their Form 26AS. Form 26AS is an annual tax statement that taxpayers can access from the Income Tax website using their Permanent Account Number (PAN).
When a person files Income Tax Return (ITR), he has to give complete information from earnings to expenses and transactions etc. The total amount earned in a year, it has to be told in the ITR. The amount earned from salary can be seen in Form 16, whereas Form 16A is seen to know the interest earned from fixed deposits. TDS is deducted on these earnings. But if TDS is not deducted then it is almost difficult to get such information.
What is Form 26AS
To avoid this hassle and to see the complete details of income and tax at one place, people download Form 26AS. But a basic problem with this form is that it shows only the income on which tax has been deducted as TDS. In this case, Form 26AS fails to show income without TDS. This means that if you do not get information in Form 26AS regarding interest in savings bank account, capital gains from sale of property, shares, mutual funds, dividends etc.
As a result, even after downloading Form 26AS, taxpayers have to separately collect the information which 26AS fails to show. To overcome this problem and make it easier for taxpayers to file ITR, AIS has been introduced. The purpose of the Annual Information Statement is to show almost all the information required for filing ITR at one place. Therefore, after the introduction of AIS, the need for Form 26AS will be done away with to some extent.
How to Download AIS
- First of all you have to go to Income Tax Department website incometax.gov.in and login here
- Here you have to go to the Services tab and select the option written AIS. You will see this option in the dropdown menu
- After selecting the AIS option, a new tab will open in which two options will be given – Tax Information Summary (TIS) on the left side of the page and AIS will be written on the right side.
- If you want, you can download both TIS and AIS as both contain almost the same information. The difference is that TIS contains information in summary form, whereas AIS contains information in detail.
- Both these statements can be downloaded in PDF or JPEG form. Password to open the statement is your PAN number (in capital) followed by date of birth (in date-month-year format). No space is to be left between the letters to enter the password.
