GUWAHATI: Thousands of people may not be able to file their income tax returns for the coming financial year as they are unable to link their Aadhaar to their PANs.
The PAN card software is at least 30 years old and does not allow people to enter their initials. However, Aadhaar now allows initials in the name since a person’s identity is authenticated biometrically. Thus, because of this, people are not being able to link the two because of the name mismatch, according to officials of the Income Tax Department, who do not have a solution to this problem yet.
The officials mentioned that the problem occurred because the two software systems are “at different levels of sophistication” and at least tens of thousands of people have been affected by this.
This is a major problem because the government has required that PAN and Aadhaar be linked for filing income tax returns for the next financial year based on a Supreme Court decision.
Income tax officials have mentioned that changes will have to be made in other identity documents as no plans exist yet to upgrade their systems that will allow abbreviations.
They also added that it was important to have these documents linked as an individual’s PAN records are extremely important to track them over time.
The only solution is for people to change their names on Aadhaar to reflect their name as it is mentioned in the PAN card. They will have no problems linking the two then, officials said.
This report was first published in The Hindu.
