Recently there has been a plethora of Writ Petitions and PILs filed in Various High Courts to extend the due date of Income Tax Audit & filing of Income Tax Returns from 30th September 2015. The Finance ministry has issued a direction that due date shall not be extended for the current year.

Currently the due date is 30th September 2015. 30th September has been due date for these compliance since 2008. Historically due date has been extended for some parts of the country or for the country as a whole after taking note of any extraordinary circumstances that may have arisen. Kashmir Floods, Hardik Patel agiation etc are recent examples of the same when the due dates were extended for specific regions by the CBDT suo moto.

Due date has been 30th Sept for quite sometime now and every Chartered Accountant and I mean EVERY Chartered Accountant and even the students pursuing the course and undergoing articleship in India knows this and are always mentally prepared for the hectic work schedule in September when the work is on war footing.

It doesn’t bode well to cry foul year after year that due date needs to be extended just because we aren’t organized enough to plan the assignments properly. Further last two years, the circumstances were extraordinary to extend the due date, which was genuinely done as well by the Central Board of Direct Taxes(CBDT). However in current year, there is no reason whatsoever to extend the due date. Just because ITR has been released by CBDT a few days late doesn’t call for extension of Tax Audit date as Tax Audit has no relation with ITR whatsoever. Further instead of going on meetings and filing Writ Petitions or PILs and using up the time of the judiciary which is already overburdened by long pending cases to try to extend the due date, time should have been used to complete the work. After all it is the clients who will suffer at the end just because we were not prepared in time. During my articleship period my Principal always used to say, ‘No matter how much work we have, we always catch the train’. It is just a matter of proper utilization of time. CBDT should not bow down to the growing clamor to extend the due date instead they should stick to their stand of not extending the due date as extending the due date will simply make it a precedence and will be used in future against CBDT time and again. After all we are a country which follows tradition which suits our need.