Successfully filed ITR? Tax refund may still get delayed this year due to THIS reason says CA, netizens disagree…

Despite successfully filing your income tax returns or ITR for this assessment year, your tax refund may be delayed, a social media user claiming to be a Chartered Accountant said.

CA Anand Luhar, who claims to be associated with the Institute of Cost & Works Accountants of India (ICWAI), in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), said that income tax refunds “will take time this year”. He claimed this was due to the I-T Department’s plan to use of a specially designed artificial intelligence software to scrutinise ITR filings.

Livemint could not independently verify this claim.

CA Claims Automated ITR Process

“IT refund will take time this year . They are going to scrutinize the returns very strictly. For this, they are adapting the specially designed, self automated and modified artificial intelligence software program (AI) for scrutinizing the field of ITR. This program will first collect the data linked with your PAN card, then it will automatically follow the linked data with your Aadhar card,” Luhar stated.

He further claimed that the AI will “tally transactions linked with your Aadhaar and PAN to the bank accounts attached”.

“It will collect all details of fixed deposits (FDs), quarterly interests credited, share dividends, share transactions, mutual fund (MF) and shares long term and short term gains of all bank accounts you declared and attached yourself with your income tax ITR returns filed by you,” he claimed.

He added that it will also tally “undeclared bank accounts on your name and also with the joint bank accounts where you are second and third holder.”

“It will also search the postal accounts and bank accounts with all cooperative banks, local credit institutions (पतसंस्था), postal fix deposits, interests, postal RDs, MIS, senior citizen saving schemes etc., either single or jointly with second name where your investments are made with the family members who are non registered ITR filers,” he added.

Further, “the PAN card will now be checked with the government registry office for any land and immovable properties transactions in the current and previous three years. After all this complicated workout the debit cards, credit cards transactions, passport, visa attached tour details, two and four wheeler purchase or sale, few AI will also compile data of social media platforms photo video trip screenshot etc,” Luhar claimed.

He added that the collected data collected will be compared to the declared and filed data. “The full proof automated AI-ITR program is successfully finalized and tested. And will be implemented for the first time from this year now,” he added.

Netizens React

The post was met with varying levels of disagreement. Some dismissed saying the website itself needs attention, while others reacted to the claims with jokes.

“Department is giving this secret information to this account regularly as to what they are going to do in future,” one X user wrote in the comments. Another joked, “Dept cant even maintain the website properly, do that first if you want someone to get fooled into believing all this la la land stories.”

Users interacting with the post also asked for proof of source for the claims, while other rubbished it by stating that they had already received their returns.