Tax Audit Date for AY 2017–18 has been Extended

The Goods and Ser­vices Tax (‘GST’) has come into effect on 01.07.2017. In recent days, dates for fil­ing var­i­ous  returns and forms  under  GST  have been  extend­ed  by the  Gov­ern­ment. In this backdrop,representations have been filed by var­i­ous stake­hold­ers request­ing for extend­ing the ‘due date’ for fil­ing var­i­ous reports of audit as well as tax-returns under the Income-tax Act from 30th Sep­tem­ber, 2017 so as to allow suf­fi­cient time to the assessees’ and tax pro­fes­sion­als, and thus, facil­i­tate their ease of com­pli­ance with statu­to­ry respon­si­bil­i­ties under var­i­ous fis­cal laws.

On con­sid­er­a­tion of the mat­ter, the Cen­tral Board of Direct Tax­es, in exer­cise of pow­ers con­ferred under sec­tion 119 of the Act, in respect of all assessees’ cov­ered under clause (a) of Expla­na­tion 2 to sub-sec­tion (1) of sec­tion 139 of the Act,hereby extends the ‘due-date’ pre­scribed there­in for fil­ing the return of income as well as var­i­ous reports of audit pre­scribed under the Income-tax Act which are required to be filed by the said ‘due date’ from 30th Sep­tem­ber, 2017 to 31st  October,2017.