The central government has made it mandatory to link PAN with Aadhaar to prevent financial fraud. The Income Tax Department has given a deadline of December 31, 2024 for this. If you do not link your PAN and Aadhaar by December 31, your PAN card will be deactivated. This will cause you problems in paying taxes, making transactions, and other problems.
Fine for linking PAN-Aadhaar
The government had made the facility of linking PAN cards with Aadhaar free till June 30, 2023. But now a fine of Rs 1,000 has to be paid as a late fee. Earlier the amount of fine was Rs 500, which has now been increased to Rs 1,000. This means that now you will have to pay Rs 1,000 as a fine for linking your Aadhaar card with your PAN.
How many people were fined
More than 2 crore taxpayers in the country linked PAN with Aadhaar after the free deadline ended. The government has recovered Rs 2,125 crore from them as a penalty. Section 234H of the Income Tax Act, 1961 provides that a person has to provide Aadhaar information under subsection (2) of section 139AA. If he does not do so, he will have to pay a fine of up to Rs 1,000 to the government.
How many PAN cards are there in the country?
If we look at the data till March 2024, more than 74 crore people in the country had PAN cards. Of these, 60.5 crore people had linked their PAN with Aadhaar. In response to an RTI in November last year, the CBDT had said that it had de-activated 11.5 crore PANs due to non-linking with Aadhaar.
How to link PAN with Aadhaar?
Go to the Income Tax website- eportal.incometax.gov.in or incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in.
Register by filling in the PAN number in place of a user ID.
Now a pop window will appear to link PAN with Aadhaar.
If this does not happen, go to profile settings and click on the Aadhaar link.
Here you will see the details of the PAN card - like date of birth, gender, and name.
Match these details with your Aadhaar. Then click on the Link Now button.
After this, it will be written on your screen that your PAN has been linked to Aadhaar.
