ITRs filed between April-June nearly doubles

New Delhi: The number of income tax returns filed between April-June 2023 nearly doubled to over 1.36 crore over the previous year, indicating early filing by taxpayers to avoid last-minute rush. The last date for filing tax returns for income earned in the previous fiscal by individuals and those who do not need to get their accounts audited is July 31. So for income earned in 2022-23 (April-March) fiscal, the deadline to file ITR for this category of taxpayers was July 31, 2023. In July, which is the last month of I-T return filing, over 5.41 crore returns were filed, taking the total number of filing to over 6.77 crore by the month-end. As per the comparative statistics of ITR filing available on the I-T e-filing portal, over 70.34 lakh tax returns were filed in April-June 2022-23. This number surged 93.76 per cent to over 1.36 crore in April-June 2023-24. The 1 crore ITR filing milestone was also reached 13 days ahead on June 26 in the current fiscal, compared to July 8 last financial year. The income tax department has attributed the relatively early ITR filing for AY 2023-24 to social media campaigns along with targeted e-mail and SMS campaigns to encourage taxpayers to be early filers.