Form 26AS and the AIS

Form 26AS is the annual information statement uploaded to a taxpayer’s e-filing account under Section 285BB of the Income-tax Act, 1961, read with Rule 114-I of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, and from the assessment year 2023-24 it carries one class of information only: tax deducted at source, tax collected at source, refunds paid where the source is the Centralised Processing Cell for TDS, and TDS or TCS defaults. Tax credit is granted on that record, which is why the figure claimed in a return has to match it.

What Form 26AS no longer carries is the part most explainers still describe. Advance tax and self-assessment tax paid, specified financial transactions, and turnover reported in GSTR-3B all moved to the Annual Information Statement on the compliance portal. A reader looking in Form 26AS for a fixed deposit, a property registration, or a challan paid in March will not find it, and the absence is not an error.

Three statements now sit side by side, and each answers a different question. Form 26AS answers what tax the department has on record against the Permanent Account Number. The Annual Information Statement, rolled out on 1 November 2021, answers what third parties reported. The Taxpayer Information Summary answers what figure will pre-fill the return. Where the first two disagree on tax, the Central Board of Direct Taxes has said which one wins.

This article covers the statutory basis and the 2020 restructure, the ten parts as they now stand, what moved out and where it went, the three statements compared, the rule on a conflict, how a central government employee’s book-adjustment credit reaches the statement, reconciliation against Form 16 before filing, the bar on a direct demand under Section 205, the Rule 114E reporting thresholds, the AIS feedback facility, downloading, the pensioner’s position, the grievance route, and the replacement of Form 26AS by Form 168 under the Income-tax Act, 2025. Form 16 is the certificate; Form 26AS is the record it is checked against.

Statutory basis and the 2020 restructure

Form 26AS has been issued under Section 285BB of the Income-tax Act, 1961 since 1 June 2020, not under the provision most older material cites. Section 103 of the Finance Act 2020 inserted Section 285BB with effect from that date, requiring the prescribed income-tax authority to upload in the registered account of the assessee “an annual information statement in such form and manner, within such time and alongwith such information, which is in the possession of an income-tax authority, as may be prescribed”. Section 92 of the same Finance Act omitted Section 203AA, the older provision under which the statement had been issued, from the same date.

The prescribing rule is Rule 114-I of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, inserted by Central Board of Direct Taxes Notification No. 30/2020, F. No. 370142/20/2020-TPL, dated 28 May 2020, which also omitted Rule 31AB. Rule 114-I requires the Principal Director General or Director General of Income-tax (Systems), or a person authorised by either, to upload the statement in Form 26AS within three months from the end of the month in which the information was received.

As drafted in May 2020 the rule listed six heads: tax deducted or collected at source, specified financial transactions, payment of taxes, demand and refund, pending proceedings, and completed proceedings. That is the wide version described in commentary from 2020 and 2021, and it is not what the statement holds today. The narrowing came later, and it came operationally rather than by amendment of the rule.

Contents from assessment year 2023-24

From the assessment year 2023-24 the Annual Tax Statement on TRACES displays ten parts, all of them concerned with tax deducted, collected or defaulted on. The Income Tax Department’s own e-tutorial for Form 26AS lists them exhaustively.

For a central government employee or a pensioner, only three of the ten normally carry anything. Salary or pension TDS sits in Part I against the deductor’s Tax Deduction and Collection Account Number. Part IV or Part VIII appears where a house was bought or sold or rent above the Section 194-IB threshold was paid. Part VII shows a refund only where the Centralised Processing Cell for TDS issued it.

No part of the list carries advance tax or self-assessment tax. The list is exhaustive by its own terms, so the absence of a tax-payment part is the answer to the most common question about the current statement rather than a gap in it.

What moved to the Annual Information Statement

Four classes of information left Form 26AS from the assessment year 2023-24: advance tax and self-assessment tax paid, refund detail beyond CPC-TDS refunds, specified financial transactions reported under Section 285BA, and turnover reported in GSTR-3B. The Income Tax Department’s e-tutorial directs the taxpayer to the Annual Information Statement on the e-filing portal for refund details, specified financial transaction details and GSTR-3B turnover. For data before the assessment year 2023-24 the display is unchanged, so an older year opened today still shows the wide statement.

The shift explains a pattern that reads like a defect. A salaried employee who paid self-assessment tax in July and looks for the challan in Form 26AS finds nothing, concludes the payment was lost, and pays again. The challan is in the AIS, credited against the Permanent Account Number, and the second payment becomes a refund claim.

The three statements compared

Form 26AS, the Annual Information Statement and the Taxpayer Information Summary are three different documents with three different jobs, and the reconciliation problem is almost always a confusion between them.

The Taxpayer Information Summary is the most misdescribed of the three. It shows a processed value, meaning the figure left after de-duplication under the department’s rules, and a derived value, meaning the figure arrived at after taking the taxpayer’s feedback into account alongside the processed value. It is the derived value that pre-fills the return, and the pre-filling updates the moment feedback is submitted.

Which statement governs a disagreement

Where Form 26AS on TRACES and the Annual Information Statement disagree about tax deducted, collected or paid, the taxpayer relies on the TRACES figure. The Central Board of Direct Taxes said so in terms in the press release announcing the AIS on 1 November 2021: where there is a variation between the TDS or TCS information, or the information relating to tax payment, displayed in Form 26AS on the TRACES portal and the same information displayed in the AIS on the compliance portal, the taxpayer may rely on the information displayed on the TRACES portal for the purpose of filing the return and for other tax compliance purposes.

That direction is narrower than it is often quoted as being. It settles which figure to use for tax, because the tax figures are drawn from processed TDS statements in both places and TRACES is the source. It does not settle income. Where the AIS reports interest or a dividend the taxpayer disputes, the route is feedback on that line, not a preference for one portal over the other.

The department also warns that the AIS shows only what it currently holds. Transactions outside it still have to be reported, so an empty line in the AIS is not authority for leaving income out of a return.

How a central government employee’s credit is populated

A central government employee’s tax reaches Form 26AS through a book adjustment, not a challan, and that route is why the entry can read Provisional for months. The chain runs in four steps. The Drawing and Disbursing Officer deducts tax from the monthly salary bill. The Pay and Accounts Office credits the amount to the Central Government by book adjustment under Rule 30(1) of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, without a physical challan, and files a monthly Form 24G. Form 24G generates a Book Identification Number. The Drawing and Disbursing Officer quotes that Book Identification Number against each employee’s deduction in the quarterly Form 24Q, and TRACES matches the two.

Two consequences follow for reading the statement. A credit marked Provisional reflects the verification state of the Form 24G and turns Final once the Pay and Accounts Officer’s statement is verified, so it is not a reason to withhold a claim. A credit that is missing altogether usually means the Book Identification Number was not quoted, or was quoted wrongly, in the Form 24Q, and the fix is a correction statement by the Drawing and Disbursing Officer.

This is also why a government employee’s statement can lag a private-sector colleague’s. The Form 24G is filed monthly by the Pay and Accounts Office and verified afterwards, adding a step that a challan-based deductor does not have. Further detail on the deduction itself is in TDS on salary.

Reconciling the salary certificate before filing

Reconcile Form 16 against Form 26AS before the return is filed, because both are generated from the same processed Form 24Q and a divergence between them is a defect in that statement rather than a difference of opinion. Part A of Form 16 and Part I of Form 26AS draw on the identical record, so the quarter-by-quarter tax deducted has to tally.

Three causes account for most divergences. A wrong Permanent Account Number in the Form 24Q sends the credit to a stranger or to no one. A wrong assessment year parks it in the wrong year, where it sits unusable. An unquoted Book Identification Number leaves a government deduction unmatched. In each case the correction is a revised Form 24Q filed by the deductor for the affected quarter, and nothing the employee does in the return will substitute for it.

The order of work matters. Download Form 16 and Form 26AS, compare the quarterly tax, then open the Annual Information Statement and check the income heads and the taxes paid against it, then file. A reconciliation done after an intimation under Section 143(1) has issued costs a rectification application that a reconciliation done in June would have avoided.

Credit that the statement does not show

A claim for tax credit above what Form 26AS shows is restricted at processing, so the record is corrected first and the claim follows. Section 199 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 treats tax deducted and paid to the Central Government as payment of tax on behalf of the person from whose income it was deducted, and Rule 37BA gives credit to the person in whose hands the income is assessable, for the assessment year in which that income is assessable, on the basis of the information furnished by the deductor. The information furnished by the deductor is what surfaces in Form 26AS.

The consequence is procedural and unforgiving. The Centralised Processing Centre matches the credit claimed in the return against its own record, allows the lower figure, and issues an intimation under Section 143(1) raising a demand for the difference. Filing the same claim again does not move it. The only step that changes the outcome is a correction statement by the deductor followed by a fresh download.

Rule 37BA also solves a timing problem worth knowing about. Where income is assessable in one year but the tax on it was deducted and reported in another, the rule allocates the credit to the year in which the income is assessed, so a genuine credit is not lost to a mismatch of years. That protects a case such as salary arrears assessed on receipt while the deduction was reported earlier, and it is claimed by declaring the position in the return rather than by any separate application.

Bar against a direct demand on the employee

Where an employer deducted tax and never deposited it, the department cannot demand that tax from the employee. Section 205 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 provides that where tax is deductible at source, the assessee shall not be called upon to pay the tax himself to the extent to which it has been deducted from that income. Section 401 of the Income-tax Act, 2025 carries the bar forward in the same words for tax years from 2026-27.

The liability sits with the deductor. Section 201 treats a person who deducts but fails to pay as an assessee in default for that amount, and Section 201(1A) charges interest at the prescribed rates from the date of deduction to the date of payment. The employee’s evidence is the salary slip and Form 16 showing the deduction.

What the bar does not do is release the credit. It answers a demand; it does not put the money in the return. A missing credit still has to be recovered through a correction statement by the deductor, which is why the practical sequence is to raise the correction and rely on Section 205 only if a demand is raised in the meantime.

Reportable transactions under Rule 114E

High-value transactions are reported to the Income Tax Department by banks, registrars, companies and mutual funds under Section 285BA of the Income-tax Act, 1961 read with Rule 114E of the Income-tax Rules, 1962, in Form 61A, and they appear in the Annual Information Statement rather than in Form 26AS. The thresholds a salaried employee or pensioner can cross without any business activity are these.

A reported entry is information, not an allegation. It records that the department already knows of the transaction, so the return has to be consistent with it: a property purchase of Rs. 40 lakh sits alongside whatever the return says about the source of funds, and a mutual-fund purchase of Rs. 12 lakh sits alongside the capital gains or the absence of them. The threshold is on the transaction, not on income, so an ordinary employee who buys a flat crosses it once and never again.

Feedback in the Annual Information Statement

Every line in the Annual Information Statement carries a feedback option, and using it changes what pre-fills the return. The five categories are that the information is correct, is not fully correct, relates to another person or year, is duplicate or already included, and is denied. The reported value and the value after feedback are then shown separately, and the derived value in the Taxpayer Information Summary updates in real time.

Feedback can be submitted line by line, in bulk for multiple entries at once, or offline through the AIS Utility, and the statement can be downloaded in PDF, JSON or CSV. Where information is modified or denied, the department may go back to the source that reported it for confirmation, so feedback is a statement of the taxpayer’s position rather than a deletion.

Submitting feedback is not the same as correcting the tax record. Feedback operates on reported financial information in the AIS; a wrong TDS entry is corrected only in the deductor’s Form 24Q, and no amount of feedback will alter what Form 26AS shows.

Downloading the three statements

Form 26AS, the Annual Information Statement and the Taxpayer Information Summary are free and are reached after logging in at incometax.gov.in. Form 26AS is opened from the e-file menu, which redirects to the TRACES portal, and a taxpayer prompted to register at TRACES has to do so once as a Taxpayer before the statement is served. The AIS and the TIS are opened under the Services tab, which leads to the compliance portal.

The download comes as HTML, PDF or text, and the PDF is protected by a password, which is the taxpayer’s date of birth in DDMMYYYY form, an eight-digit string with no separators. Two limits are worth knowing. A statement carrying more than 1,500 transaction entries is served only as a text file, which the taxpayer converts. The Excel option does not appear at all when the statement is reached through net banking or through incometax.gov.in, and is available only from the TRACES portal itself.

All three are also reachable through registered net banking with a bank that offers the facility, with no fee in any route.

Pensioners and multiple pension payers

A pensioner’s Form 26AS shows one line for each deductor, and reading it as a single figure is the recurring error. The pension-paying bank deducts tax on the pension under Section 192 and reports it in its own Form 24Q, so the deduction appears in Part I against that bank’s Tax Deduction and Collection Account Number, exactly as an employer’s would.

The complication is that a bank certifies only what it pays. A pensioner drawing a second pension from another authority, family pension paid to the same person, or interest on which tax was deducted under Section 194A will find a separate Part I line for each of those deductors, and the return has to total them. The Taxpayer Information Summary aggregates the income side, which is what makes it the better starting point than any single certificate for a pensioner. Further detail on the pensioner’s computation is in income tax for pensioners.

A pensioner in the year of retirement carries lines from two payers for the same year, the office for the pre-retirement salary months and the bank for the pension months, and the Section 89 relief computation on arrears is done against the totalled figures rather than either certificate alone.

Correcting an error and the grievance route

An error in Form 26AS is corrected in the deductor’s statement, and the taxpayer’s own escalation is an online grievance on TRACES. The sequence is to ask the Drawing and Disbursing Officer or the employer to file a correction statement for the affected quarter of Form 24Q, wait for TRACES to process it, and re-download the statement before filing. TRACES regenerates both Form 16 and Form 26AS from the processed statement each time, so a correction filed once fixes both documents.

Where the deductor does not act, the taxpayer raises the matter through the Request for Resolution facility on the TRACES website, which is the Income Tax Department’s own online grievance channel for a taxpayer, and the department also operates a helpline for statement-related queries.

The return is still filed by the due date on the correct figures while the correction is pending. Section 205 answers any demand for tax already deducted, and a revised return or a rectification application under Section 154 carries the credit once the corrected statement is processed. Waiting past the due date converts a credit problem into a late-filing fee under Section 234F, which is a worse position.

Replacement by Form 168 from tax year 2026-27

Form 26AS becomes Form 168 from tax year 2026-27, and the tax credit statement and the Annual Information Statement merge into that one document. Section 510 of the Income-tax Act, 2025 reproduces Section 285BB almost word for word, requiring the prescribed income-tax authority to upload an annual information statement in the registered account of the assessee. The Income-tax Rules, 2026, notified by Central Board of Direct Taxes Notification No. 22/2026, G.S.R. 198(E), dated 20 March 2026 with effect from 1 April 2026, prescribe Form 168 under Rule 245 for that statement.

The companion renumbering keeps the family together. Form 16 becomes Form 130 under Rule 215, Form 16A becomes Form 131, and Form 24Q, the quarterly salary statement from which both the certificate and the annual statement are built, becomes Form 138 under Rule 219. On the Act side, Section 199 and Section 190 are consolidated into Section 390, whose sub-sections (5) and (6) treat deducted tax as paid on the taxpayer’s behalf and empower the rules on giving credit, and Section 205 becomes Section 401.

The renumbering does not reach the current filing season. For the assessment year 2026-27, assessing the financial year 2025-26, the statement is Form 26AS under Section 285BB of the Income-tax Act, 1961 read with Rule 114-I, and the Annual Information Statement remains a separate document served from the compliance portal.

Related Articles

• Form 16
• Form 16A
• TDS on salary (Section 192)
• Income tax for government employees
• Income tax for pensioners
• Advance tax
• Self-assessment tax
• Form 10-IEA and opting out of the new regime
• Standard deduction
• Section 87A rebate
• Section 89 relief on arrears
• Section 80C
• Old versus new tax regime
• Income-tax Act, 2025
• Professional tax
• Take-home salary for central government employees
• Central Board of Direct Taxes
• Drawing and Disbursing Officer
• Pay and Accounts Office
• NPS tax benefits
• National Pension System
• Dearness allowance
• House rent allowance
• Basic pay
• 7th Central Pay Commission
• Family pension
• Central government pension
• Central government employees in India
• Unified Pension Scheme
• Old Pension Scheme
• PPO and the annual life certificate
• Gratuity for central government employees
• Leave encashment
• Department of Personnel and Training
• Income tax calculator
• 7th CPC salary calculator

External references

• Income Tax Department e-filing portal
• TRACES (TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System)
• Income Tax Department, e-tutorial on Form 26AS and the Annual Tax Statement
• Ministry of Finance, Roll out of new Annual Information Statement (AIS), 1 November 2021
• Income Tax Department, notifications and circulars
• Central Board of Direct Taxes

References

1. Income-tax Act, 1961, Section 285BB (annual information statement), inserted by Section 103 of the Finance Act 2020 with effect from 1 June 2020; Section 203AA omitted by Section 92 of the same Act from the same date.
2. Income-tax Rules, 1962, Rule 114-I (annual information statement in Form 26AS, uploaded within three months from the end of the month of receipt of the information), inserted by Central Board of Direct Taxes Notification No. 30/2020, F. No. 370142/20/2020-TPL, dated 28 May 2020, which also omitted Rule 31AB.
3. Income Tax Department, Centralised Processing Cell (TDS), e-tutorial on Form 26AS and the Annual Tax Statement, listing the ten parts appearing from the assessment year 2023-24 and directing the taxpayer to the Annual Information Statement for refund details, specified financial transactions and GSTR-3B turnover.
4. Ministry of Finance press release, Roll out of new Annual Information Statement (AIS), 1 November 2021, on the compliance portal rollout, the feedback categories, the processed and derived values in the Taxpayer Information Summary, and the direction to rely on the TRACES figure where the two portals differ.
5. Income-tax Act, 1961, Section 199 (tax deducted treated as payment on behalf of the deductee), read with Income-tax Rules, 1962, Rule 37BA (credit to the person in whose hands the income is assessable, for the assessment year in which it is assessable, on the basis of the deductor’s information).
6. Income-tax Act, 1961, Section 205 (bar against direct demand on the assessee) and Section 201 with Section 201(1A) (deductor as assessee in default, and interest).
7. Income-tax Act, 1961, Section 285BA read with Income-tax Rules, 1962, Rule 114E and Form 61A (statement of financial transactions and the reporting thresholds).
8. Income-tax Rules, 1962, Rule 30(1) (payment of government deductions by book adjustment) and Rule 31A (quarterly statements in Form 24Q).
9. Income-tax Act, 2025, Section 390, Section 401, Section 508 and Section 510, and the Income-tax Rules, 2026, notified by Central Board of Direct Taxes Notification No. 22/2026, G.S.R. 198(E), dated 20 March 2026 with effect from 1 April 2026, Rule 245 (Form 168 from tax year 2026-27), Rule 215 (Form 130) and Rule 219 (Form 138).