Link your PAN to Aadhar by December 31 or it may become inoperative

There are four simple ways to link PAN to Aadhaar; make the most of deadline to avoid hassles later

There are only seven days left for linking your Income-tax permanent account number (PAN) with your Aadhaar–the deadline is December 31. Linking PAN to Aadhar is mandatory if you want to file your income tax return. Says Balwant Jain, a Mumbai-based tax expert:

“Those who have not linked their PAN to their Aadhar by this date will find their PAN becoming inoperative.” Initially, the authorities had proposed to render the PAN invalid for non-linkage by September this year. However, rendering it invalid would have put a question mark on all transactions done using the PAN Card prior to that date as well. Jain says, “In order to protect the validity of the transactions that have already been effected, the PAN will now become inoperative by December 31, if it isn’t linked to Aadhar by this date.” This effectively means that you will no longer be able to use it with prospective effect. All retrospective transactions will remain valid.

That said, an inoperative PAN would most likely be useless for any kind of transactions. After December 31, one will be obliged to quote it along with the Aadhaar number while filing an income tax return (ITR) unless specifically exempted. There are two ways to do do the linking, offline and online.

Here’s the step-by-step procedure:

The first step: Check if your PAN and Aadhar have already been linked. Many might have done this already and forgotten about it. For those who are already registered users of the income tax filing website and have filed returns in the past, there’s a possibility that the PAN and Aadhaar have already been linked. If you aren’t sure…

Update details to link PAN and Aadhaar, mismatch leads to failure

Difference of even a single alphabet in the names given means linking won't happen

#LATEST | From July 1, 2017, all tax returns will have to mention the Aadhaar number, according to the newly-introduced Section 139AA of the Income Tax Act. If you have both PAN and Aadhaar, you need to link the two. If you fail to do so, your PAN number could become invalid. Many people are, however, facing difficulties in linking these two databases.

When you try to link Aadhaar with PAN, three things need to match: name, year of birth and gender. If any of these details don't match, the linking fails. Many people are having problems because their names are different in the two databases. Some have used initials in their names in the PAN card. "The Aadhaar database does not allow initials. It accepts only full names. During the linking process, the names in the two databases need to match alphabet by alphabet. If there is a difference of even a single alphabet, the linking fails. People from South India in particular are facing a lot of problems because of the use of initials in PAN," says Chetan Chandak, head-tax research, H&R Block. People who have abbreviated their middle name in PAN (for instance, Kumar shortened to K) while using the full form in Aadhaar are also encountering problems.

The third category facing difficulties is people with special characters in their names. For instance, a surname like D'Souza has an apostrophe. While the PAN database accepts special characters, the Aadhaar database doesn't, causing a mismatch.

Women who have changed their surnames after marriage are also having difficulty. They may have got their Aadhaar before marriage and PAN after marriage, or vice versa. As the two documents have different names, they are unable to link them.

Finally, people who have gone abroad to work and don't yet have an Aadhaar card will also face a problem in filing their tax return this year. "You have to get your biometrics registered to obtain an Aadhaar card and that is possible only in India," says Naveen Wadhwa, deputy general manager, Taxmann.| read more....