- The Documentation Identification Number (DIN) system of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has come into existence from October 1, 2019.
- About 17,500 communications with DIN were generated on the very first day.
- The DIN system has been created as per the direction of Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman and from now onwards every CBDT communication will have to have a documentation identification number.
- From today, any communication from Income Tax Department without a computer generated DIN, be it a notice, letter, order and summon or any other correspondence, would be treated as invalid and shall be non est in law or deemed to be as if it has never been issued.
- The DIN system would ensure greater accountability and transparency in tax administration.
- Now from today onwards, all such communications with DIN would be verifiable on the e-filing portal and no communication would be issued manually without DIN except only if it is in the specified exceptional circumstances.
- CBDT has specified that any communication issued manually under exceptional circumstances would have to be uploaded and regularised on the system portal within 15 days of its issuance.
- CBDT has also stated that all pending assessment proceedings, where notices were earlier issued manually, prior to the DIN related Circular dated 14.08.2019 coming into existence, all such cases would be identified and notices so sent would be uploaded on ITBA by the end of this month, i.e., by 31st Oct 2019.
- This is in pursuance of the directions by the Prime Minister in which he has asked the Department of Revenue to come up with specific measures to ensure that the honest taxpayers are not harassed and served better. It may be noted that earlier there have been some instances where it was not possible to maintain the audit trail of the manually issued communication which in some cases caused inconvenience to taxpayers sometime. However, with the present system of attaching a DIN to every notice or communication of CBDT would result in better services to taxpayers without any possible harassment.
