After the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed in the budget that only the biometric ID is enough to file income tax returns, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) chief said the taxman will ¡°suo motu¡±? issue a fresh PAN to the person who files I-T returns with only Aadhaar.?
It will be the part of a new arrangement in order to link the two databases.
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The PAN (permanent account number), however is still? valid and the interchangeability announced in the recent budget is an ¡°additional facility¡± to ensure linkage of the PAN and Aadhaar database which is now mandatory under the law, Pramod Chandra Mody said.
"In cases where Aadhaar is being quoted and PAN is not there, we could possibly think on the terms of allotting a PAN to the person (who is filing income tax return)," he told PTI in an interview.
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Mody was asked whether the PAN will still remain important after finance minister Sitharaman in her first budget speech announced that Aadhaar and PAN, both will serve purpose of filing the I-T returns by simply quoting their Aadhaar number and this number can also be used wherever the person is required to quote PAN.
"This is a wrong way of looking at the issue. PAN is certainly not dead. PAN is very much alive. It is just a question of providing an additional facility to the taxpayer that if he is not quoting PAN and only has Aadhaar, his filing and processes do not get affected," Mody said.
Mody further added that the accessing officer of the department will use his powers to allot PAN to an entity.?
"The law provides that the assessing officer can suo motu also allot PAN. So, if Aadhaar is being quoted without PAN, I give him the PAN. It becomes linked," the CBDT chairman said.
¡®Suo motu¡¯ mean ¡®on its own motion¡¯ and it¡¯s a Latin word.
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The CBDT chief said that now linking the two databases is compulsory and back by law. While PAN is a 10-digit alphanumeric number allotted by the tax department to an individual, entity or a firm,? Aadhaar is a unique issued to a person by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
As per the tax experts, the Section 139 of the I-T Act empowers the assessing officer of the department to take suo motu cognizance and issue a PAN to anyone whom they think should? have an ID given one¡¯s financial transactions profile.
The experts said that both the UIDAI and the I-T department have linked their Aadhaar and PAN databases respectively, so that former¡¯s data can help taxman to get vital identity information of any person to allot that person a new PAN without any problem.
All vital information of an individual such as name, date of birth, photo, gender, address and even the biometrics are there in Aadhaar and the same set of information is required to obtain a PAN.
At present, over 120 crore Aadhaar numbers have been issued in the country, while this number is about 41 crore when it comes to the generation of PAN numbers. Out of these, an estimated 22 crore PANs are linked with Aadhaar.