Form 26AS and AIS: the two statements to read before you file

The AIS comes with a Taxpayer Information Summary that totals each category; those totals are what pre-fill the return. Use Form 26AS to claim credit for taxes and the AIS to check that every income the department knows about is in the return.

Form 26AS. Log in to the e-filing portal, open e-File, Income Tax Returns, View Form 26AS, confirm the redirection to TRACES, choose the assessment year and view as HTML or download as PDF.

AIS. On the same portal open the Annual Information Statement under Services (it also appears under e-File), choose the financial year, and view or download the AIS and the summary as PDF or JSON. There is also an AIS for Taxpayer mobile app.

The PDF password for the AIS is your PAN in lower case followed by your date of birth, or date of incorporation, as ddmmyyyy. For PAN ABCDE1234F and 5 March 1990 it is abcde1234f05031990.

Entries are reported by banks, brokers, registrars and others, and errors are common: interest on a joint deposit shown in full against the second holder, a sale value without the purchase cost, a transaction belonging to another PAN, the same item reported twice. Open the entry, choose to give feedback, and select the reason that applies: the information is correct, not fully correct, relates to another PAN or year, is a duplicate, is denied, or the income is not taxable. For a sale of securities you can enter the correct cost.

The feedback goes to the reporting source for confirmation, and the portal now shows its status. Once accepted, the AIS is updated and shows both the reported and the modified value. File the return on the correct figures without waiting, and keep the evidence: the feedback on record is your answer if the mismatch is ever queried.

Only the deductor can fix this. The usual causes are a wrong PAN in the deductor’s statement, a statement not filed, or tax deducted but not deposited. Write to the deductor with the payment details, ask them to file a correction statement on TRACES, and check Form 26AS again after a week or two. Claiming a credit in the return that is not in Form 26AS leads to a demand at processing; where an employer deducted tax from salary and did not deposit it, the law protects the employee from recovery, but you will have to show the payslips.

The Centralised Processing Centre compares the return with both statements. Income in the AIS that is not in the return produces a communication under the e-verification scheme asking you to confirm or explain, and unexplained differences become an adjustment in the intimation under section 143(1) or, for larger amounts, a notice proposing reassessment. The fix is nearly always cheaper before filing than after: reconcile first, and where the difference is genuine, record it through AIS feedback.

If a notice has already arrived, our notice reply service handles the response; if you would rather the reconciliation were done before filing, a CA-filed return starts from ₹499.