The department has invited stakeholder feedback on the draft rules and forms till February 22, 2026. All suggestions will be examined seriously, and required corrections will be incorporated, as was done while adopting the Income-tax Act, 2025, they added.
Given the tight timeline, stakeholders had flagged the need for system adjustments. CBDT sources said that after receiving responses by February 22, changes would be incorporated within about a week, with notification expected at the latest by the first week of March.
The clarification addresses concerns over transitional overlap. Returns filed in July–August 2026 will relate to Assessment Year 2026–27 and cover income of the previous financial year. However, from April 1, 2026, transactional forms such as tax deducted at source (TDS) statements, remittances, Form 60, and Form 15G/15H will operate under the new simplified framework, as per sources.
“The rules are expected to be notified in March 2026. This is important as taxpayers need to use some of the forms immediately from April 1. An example is the form for applying for a lower rate of withholding,” said Rohinton Sidhwa, partner at Deloitte.
Some perquisite thresholds have been revised in the draft rules to align with current market realities, CBDT officials said, adding that earlier limits were too low.
Prefilled information will continue uninterrupted, and taxpayers will retain the option to add or modify details. “It is not that pre-filling will be stopped,” a CBDT official said. The re-engineering of forms and rules is guided by three key objectives: simplification of language, standardisation of terminology for consistent interpretation and reporting, and enhanced pre-filling capabilities to reduce errors and inconsistencies between reported data and ITRs.
“We have standardised terminology. Any term used in one form will mean the same thing in another form. This helps in integration of data and reduces interpretation issues. It also brings consistency in reporting because the forms are used by taxpayers, reporting agencies, banks and through TDS systems,” the official said.
Standardised fields will make pre-population of returns more robust, giving greater certainty to taxpayers and easing the filing process. The forms have also been designed for automatic reconciliation with existing data sources such as Form 26AS, minimising the need to enter the same information twice.
To speed up processing, the department aims to move towards structured responses—capturing details such as section reference and short explanations through defined fields rather than lengthy narratives.
