Form 26AS

Form 26AS is the government's own ledger of tax paid against a PAN. Where a payslip or a certificate is the payer's claim about what it withheld, Form 26AS records what the department has actually received and matched.

That distinction is the whole point of the document. An employer can deduct tax, show it on a payslip, issue a certificate, and still not have deposited the money. Only Form 26AS settles whether it arrived. When a return is filed, the credit claimed is checked against this statement, so it is the version that governs.

It is maintained under the Income Tax Act and its rules and populated from the returns that deductors and collectors file. Nobody types entries into it directly, which is why errors in it are corrected by revising the underlying return rather than by editing the statement.

The statement is organised by the source of the tax rather than by the taxpayer's own record keeping.

The salary line under Section 192 is the one an employee checks most. It should carry the employer's TAN, four quarterly entries for a full year of employment, and totals that agree with the payslips. The scope of the statement has been amended, with several categories of wider financial information moving to the annual information statement, so confirm the current contents against the rule in force rather than assuming a category still appears here.

Both are statements the department holds about a taxpayer, and they answer different questions.

Form 26AS is narrow and evidentiary. It is about tax, and it is the basis for claiming credit. The annual information statement is broad and informational. It reports financial transactions the department has been told about, including interest paid by banks, dividends, securities transactions, and high value spending, whether or not any tax was deducted.

For filing purposes the practical rule is straightforward. Take tax credit from Form 26AS. Use the annual information statement to check that income has not been left out of the return, because it shows the department what to look for. An item there that is wrong can be responded to with feedback rather than simply ignored.

It is available on the income tax e-filing portal after logging in with the PAN, under the e-file menu where income tax returns and the statement are grouped. From there the taxpayer picks the assessment year and views or downloads it, and the file is password protected using the date of birth in the prescribed format.

Two points save time. Choose the assessment year, not the financial year: tax deducted during 2025-26 appears under assessment year 2026-27, and picking the wrong one produces an empty statement that gets mistaken for missing credit. And check it during the year rather than at filing, because a mismatch found in July has an easy fix and one found the week a return is due does not.

There are only a few causes, and they call for different responses.

• The quarterly return for that period has not been filed or processed yet, which is the most common reason and resolves on its own.
• The employer deducted but has not deposited the tax, which is a default by the employer.
• The tax was reported against a wrong or missing PAN, so the credit is sitting under someone else's statement or nowhere.
• The challan the employer deposited has not matched to the deductee entries in the return.

All except the first need the employer to revise the return. An employee is generally not liable for tax that was withheld from their salary and not paid over, and payslips are evidence of the deduction, but claiming credit the statement does not show still draws a demand that has to be contested. Raising it with payroll when it appears is faster than proving it later.

Form 26AS is where an employer's TDS process is graded, because it reflects what was reported rather than what was intended. The reconciliation that keeps it clean happens at each quarter's close: challans matched to deductee entries, PANs validated before the return goes in rather than after it is rejected, and any short deposit corrected inside the quarter.

Employers who do this find employee queries about missing credit almost disappear, and Part A of Form 16 generates on TRACES without incident in June. Employers who do not tend to meet both problems together, in the fortnight when they have least room to fix either.

The statement survives the change of Act and changes its name and its form number. Rule 245 of the Income-tax Rules, 2026 requires the Director General of Income-tax (Systems), or a person authorised by him, to upload an ANNUAL INFORMATION STATEMENT in FORM NO. 168 into the assessee's registered account, under section 510 of the Income-tax Act, 2025.

The upload is due within ninety days from the end of the month in which the information is received, which is worth knowing before treating a missing entry as a missing credit: information received late in a month can legitimately not appear for some time.

The statement carries seven categories of information: tax deducted or collected at source; specified financial transactions; payment of taxes; demand and refund; pending proceedings; completed proceedings; and any other information the Board authorises. The Board may also authorise the upload of information received from any officer, authority or body performing a function under any law, or received under an agreement referred to in section 159.

Two practical points carry over from the old statement unchanged. The statement is populated from returns filed by deductors and from challans, so an entry that is wrong is corrected by revising the underlying return rather than by editing the statement. And the demand, refund and proceedings categories mean it is not only a tax-credit record: it is the fullest picture the department publishes back to a taxpayer of what it holds about them.