Aadhaar and Pan linking: Relief for taxpayers as Centre extends deadline

The Centre on Thursday extended the deadline for linking Permanent Account Numbers (PAN) with the Aadhaar by four months to December 31. The move comes a day after the Centre informed the Supreme Court that it would extend the deadline for mandatory Aadhaar to avail social benefits until December 31.

"To facilitate ease of compliance by the taxpayers, CBDT has extended the date (for) ... linking Aadhaar with PAN till December 31, 2017," the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

Also, the 'due-date' for filing Income Tax returns and audit reports has been extended by a month to October 31 for all taxpayers who were liable to file their returns by September 30, 2017.

The Centre's move is interesting, given that barely a few weeks ago Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey had said that tax payers will have to link their PAN with Aadhaar by the stipulated deadline as the Supreme Court verdict on privacy has no bearing on the requirement.

Thursday's move by the Central government brings a huge relief to those who had filed their Income Tax returns by August 5, but were unable to link their Aadhaar with the PAN.

Several taxpayers had complained that they were unable to link their Aadhaar with the PAN. The tax department had received several complaints from taxpayers expressing their inability to link the two identification numbers as their names in the Aadhaar and PAN databases were different.

With PTI Inputs