Income Tax department to reject tax audit reports filed without ICAI

Tax audit reports filed by businesses risk getting rejected by the Income Tax department if they are not authenticated by the professional regulator of chartered accountants, the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAI).

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The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, in its gazette notification dated 2^nd August 2019, had made the generation of UDIN from the ICAI website mandatory for every kind of certificate/tax audit report and other attests made by their members as required by various regulators. This was introduced to curb fake certifications by non-CAs misrepresenting themselves as Chartered Accountants.

In line with the ongoing initiatives of the Income Tax Department for integrating with other Government agencies and bodies, the Income-tax e-filing portal has completed its integration with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) portal for validation of Unique Document Identification Number (UDIN) generated from ICAI portal by the Chartered Accountants for documents certified/attested by them.

The Income-tax e-filing portal had already factored mandatory quoting of UDIN with effect from 27^th April 2020 for documents certified/attested in compliance with the Income-tax Act,1961 by a Chartered Accountant.

CBDT to validate UDIN at the time of upload of Tax Audit Reports

With this system-level integration, UDIN provided for the audit reports/certificates submitted by the Chartered Accountants in the e-filing portal shall be validated online with the ICAI. This will help in weeding out fake or incorrect Tax Audit Reports not duly authenticated with the ICAI.

If for any reason, a Chartered Accountant was not able to generate UDIN before submission of audit report/certificate, the Income-tax e-filing portal permits such submission, subject to the Chartered Accountant updating the UDIN generated for the form within 15 calendar days from the date of form submission in the Income-tax e-filing portal. If the UDIN for the audit report/certificate is not updated within the 15 days provided for the same, such audit report/certificate uploaded shall be treated as invalid submission.

Mean-while, India’s Covid-19 tally of cases climbed to 93.09 lakh with 43,082 new cases in a day, while 87,18,517 people have recuperated so far pushing the national recovery rate to 93.64 percent on Friday, according to the Union Health Ministry data. The total coronavirus cases mounted to 93,09,787 and the death toll climbed to 1,35,715 with the novel coronavirus virus claiming 492 lives in a span of 24 hours in the country, the data updated at 8 am showed.

The Covid-19 case fatality rate has further declined to 1.45 percent. There are 4,55,555 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country which comprises 4.89 percent of the total caseload, the data stated. According to the ICMR, a cumulative total of 13,70,62,749 samples have been tested up to November 26 with 11,31,204 samples being tested on Thursday.