Tax
The article shows you the right way to allow your CA or other intermediary to file your income tax return instead of sharing username and password.
Many CAs while engaging with you for return filing will ask only your documents like Form 16 and bank account / MF / Demat statements etc. to file your return. If they ask for your login-password as well, that could be an immediate red flag 🚩.
Sharing credentials of income tax portal with anyone is the same as giving your house keys or Net-banking user name/password to a third party. You are trusting them not to do anything that will get you into trouble.
From the Income Tax authorities stand-point, every return filed using your login-password will be tagged as:
ITR - “Filed By: Self”
This is irrespective of whether you yourself filed it or some one else like a CA did on your behalf. There is no accountability of the CA and if you get a Income Tax notice, it will be your headache to deal with it. Your CA may or may not help at that point.
Fortunately the income tax portal offers multiple alternatives to register your CA (or other intermediary) so that they have the necessary accountability.
The income tax portal offers multiple options to register an intermediary for purposes like audits and filing on behalf of others based on certain conditions. Once you login to the Income Tax website to file your return, you will see this option in the top menu:
Click the “Authorised Partners” option and choose one of the options here. For most people, you will be choosing the second option “My Chartered Accountant (CA)”. We will explain all the five options in order.
e-Return Intermediary (ERI) is a company (like Cleartax) or another software that files income tax return for you electronically. If you are using ERI, then that website or tool will give you the option to link your tax account or you can do the same yourself from this option using the Add ERI button.
Note: If you are using Cleartax, your ERI name will be Clearsharp Technology Private Limited.
For most people using a CA for filing the return, you can add your CA to the portal using the Add CA button here.
Once you click the “Add CA” button, the wizard starts asking for the CA’s membership number.
A user can register to act as representative assessee of another person for carrying out their activities in e-filing under certain circumstances.
There is a detailed “Things you should know before proceeding” list before you exercise this option. Representative Assessees are applicable in the cases as below:
Editor’s note: This list is exactly as per the Income Tax portal and the terms chosen are from the IT portal.
A user can register to act on behalf of another person for carrying out their activities in e-Filing portal under certain circumstances.
This option is for those individuals who are planning to file returns on the behalf of another person as per the criteria below. There is a detailed “Things you should know before proceeding” list before you exercise this option snippets from which are provided below:
Any assessee who is incapable of acting on their own due to some valid reason , he / she can authorise someone else to act on their behalf.
There is a detailed “Things you should know before proceeding” list before you exercise this option.
You must review the submission before the filing by doing the e-Verification yourself. The key thing to check at this point is that the income details are correct and the exemptions are genuine. Once the filing is done, you must change the password immediately.
Alternatively, you can provide documents like Form 16, Form 26AS, AIS etc to the CA so that they can prepare the JSON file to be uploaded. They provide the JSON file to you while you upload yourself into the IT portal.
Tip: If you login into the IT portal via Netbanking, then the e-Verification of your ITR happens automatically.
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This post titled Do not share login and password of income tax portal with your CA. Here is what you should do instead. first appeared on 12 Jul 2023 at https://arthgyaan.com
