Sometimes you may come across a strange error when an income tax return cannot be submitted. It fails with an error regarding the bank account asking you to reach the developer with the error details.
Here is the background, and what you can do about it.
At least One Bank Account for Refund
,You will need to specify, and select at least one bank account that will be used by the income tax department to send refunds to you when applicable. In the absence of this a return cannot be filed. Simple as that. And this is so, even when you are not expecting a refund!
Bank Validation
After the bank details have been added, they need to be validated by the income tax department. If you have just added the new bank details, the validation will be auto triggered. But let us say, you have had some issues, such as the KYC not being completed with the bank, Aadhaar and PAN not being linked etc. In such cases, áfter’ you have made the needed corrections/updates with bank or tax portal for the same, you will need to validate again in the income tax portal. You will use the Profile Edit option in the main menu at the top, and trigger the Validate option manually. The validation can take from few minutes to couple of days mostly. Usually never longer than that. Once the status says 'validated' in your bank section, the portal is ready to use this account.
Frustrating Exception
Let’s say you had already created the income tax return, and you got the bank validation error even if you had fixed it already successfully. When you try to submit the return, you may still get the error I mentioned at the beginning of this article. It is frustrating as you go, and check and check, and re-confirm everything looks okay, yet you are unable to submit the return.
What you need to do
Unfortunately the income tax portal will not update the draft return automatically. So you will need to start from the first step of creating the income tax return. Thankfully, you don’t need to re-do everything. You just need to go the first screen of the draft return, and keep clicking the confirmation, and next screen until you reach the end section again. It may happen sometimes that the bank detail are not appearing in the first screens of the return, and you may need to add again. Once you add it (if a blank was showing), the validation status will be taken into account by the portal automatically. What you are doing is, forcing the software to process each screen again by starting from beginning.
This resolves the issues. If it doesn’t, please go through the plan B of removing the bank account, and adding again. If that also doesn’t help, check again with your banker if the account was really ready for refunds. If you still can’t fix it, please raise the issue as a complaint in the Income Tax Portal, and keep searching on the Internet in the meanwhile!
Hope this helps for some who struggled like me for a while to fix the issue.
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