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The Annual Information Statement (AIS), launched in 2021 to ease compliance, has transitioned from a supportive "nudge" into a harsh enforcement trigger for tax reassessments. Assessing Officers increasingly issue notices based solely on unverified data mismatches, bypassing mandatory statutory inquiry safeguards. This shift is compounded by unreliable third-party reporting, joint-holder mis-attributions, and a confusing maze of internal machine codes. To restore fairness, the author advocates for mandatory officer verification before issuing notices, simplified plain-English explanations, and merging overlapping tax documents into a single self-correction portal.
BACKGROUND
Section 285BB of the Income-tax Act, 1961, read with Rule 114-I of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, mandates the tax department to make available to every assessee an Annual Information Statement (AIS) — a consolidated record of TDS/TCS, Specified Financial Transactions (SFT), tax payments, demand/refund, GST returns, foreign remittances, dividend and mutual fund data reported by third parties (banks, RTAs, depositories, GST Network, and others).1 Alongside AIS sits the Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS), a category-wise aggregated and “processed” version of the same data,
