How to claim a TDS refund

Log in to the e-filing portal and open Form 26AS along with the Annual Information Statement and the Taxpayer Information Summary. Form 26AS is your consolidated tax credit statement, produced from the quarterly TDS returns filed by everyone who deducted from you. The AIS is broader — it also reports interest, dividends, securities transactions and high-value payments the department has been told about.

Reconcile against your own records: salary slips, bank interest certificates, Form 16 from the employer and Form 16A from any other deductor. What you are looking for is any deduction you know happened that does not appear.

If a deduction is missing, the deductor either did not file, filed late, or filed with the wrong PAN. Contact them with the payment details and ask them to file a correction statement. Until they do, you cannot claim that credit, and claiming it anyway produces a mismatch notice rather than a refund.

If the AIS shows income you do not recognise, submit feedback against that specific entry through the AIS itself rather than ignoring it. Unexplained entries are a common trigger for a follow-up notice, and the feedback facility exists precisely to close them off before that happens.

Check that your PAN and Aadhaar are linked. An inoperative PAN attracts deduction at a much higher rate and can block credit entirely, and the fix is administrative rather than difficult.

Finally, decide which tax regime you are filing under before you compute anything. The regime determines which deductions you can use, which changes your liability, which changes the refund. Working it out afterwards means redoing the return.

Pre-validate your bank account on the portal before filing, and nominate it for refund. The account must be in your own name, linked to your PAN, and the name on the bank record must match the name on the PAN. Refunds are paid electronically only — there is no cheque route to fall back on.

Choose the correct return form for your sources of income. Filing on the wrong form makes the return defective, and a defective return does not produce a refund until it is corrected.

Claim the TDS credit in the schedule provided, matching each entry to the deductor's TAN as it appears in 26AS. Do not round figures. A credit claimed that does not tie to a 26AS entry is the single most common reason a refund is reduced.

Claim advance tax and self-assessment tax paid in their own schedules — these are also refundable if you overpaid, and people routinely forget them.

File within the due date if you can. A belated return is still accepted up to the later deadline, but it costs you a late fee and, in some cases, the ability to carry losses forward.

E-verify immediately after filing, within the prescribed window. An unverified return is treated as never filed, and this is where a surprising number of refunds die silently. Verification is done by Aadhaar OTP, net banking, bank account EVC or by posting the signed acknowledgement.

Then wait for the intimation. The department processes the return and issues an intimation setting out its own computation against yours. If it agrees, the refund is released to the pre-validated account, usually with interest for the period it was held.

Track the refund status on the portal. If it shows as failed, the cause is nearly always the bank account, and the fix is a refund reissue request after correcting or re-validating the account details.

Bank account not validated, closed, or in a different name. The most common failure by a wide margin. Re-validate the account or add a new one, then raise a refund reissue request from the portal. Account details that changed because your bank merged with another are a frequent culprit, because the IFSC changed and the old one no longer resolves.

Adjustment against an outstanding demand. The department can set a refund off against tax it says you owe from an earlier year, but it must give you the opportunity to respond first. If you receive that intimation, respond within the stated period — either agreeing, or disagreeing with reasons and evidence. Ignoring it is treated as agreement, and the refund disappears into an old demand you may not even accept.

Mismatch between the credit claimed and 26AS. Produces a reduced refund and an intimation showing the department's figures. If the deductor has since corrected their return, file a rectification request so the return is reprocessed against the updated credit.

An error in the intimation itself. Rectification is the route where the mistake is apparent from the record — a credit ignored, an arithmetic error, a schedule misread. Where the disagreement is substantive rather than clerical, an appeal is the correct route, not rectification.

Return not e-verified. Check the status on the portal. If the window has expired, condonation of the delay can be sought.

Refund claimed in a return filed very late. There is a route to claim a refund where the return could not be filed in time, through an application for condonation of delay, but it is discretionary and requires a genuine reason. It is not a substitute for filing.

If none of the above applies and the refund is simply not moving, raise a grievance through the portal's grievance module, and escalate to the central public grievance system if that does not produce a response. Both create a tracked record with a response obligation, which is worth more than repeated phone calls.

A refund is money you lent the government for up to a year and a half. Where the deduction was avoidable, avoiding it is better than reclaiming it.

Form 15G and Form 15H are declarations that your total income is below the taxable limit, given to a bank or other payer so that they do not deduct on interest. They are not a way to escape tax — a false declaration has consequences — and 15H is for senior citizens while 15G is for everyone else who qualifies. Submit them at the start of the financial year, to every branch or institution that pays you interest, and repeat them annually.

Where the flat TDS rate genuinely exceeds your liability but you are not below the taxable limit, the correct instrument is an application for a certificate for deduction at a lower rate or nil deduction. The payer then deducts at the certified rate. This matters most for professionals and contractors with substantial expenses against gross receipts, and for non-residents.

Non-residents are the group most affected. TDS on payments to a non-resident is deducted at rates that assume no deductions and often no treaty relief, so the over-deduction can be very large and the refund cycle very long. A lower deduction certificate obtained in advance is worth the effort.

Buyers of property pay TDS on the purchase price and are personally liable for it. Deduct it, deposit it against the seller's PAN, and issue the certificate — otherwise the seller cannot claim credit and will come after you for the shortfall.

Tenants paying rent above the threshold have the same obligation. It is the tenant who is the deductor, and a landlord who never received a certificate has no way to claim the credit.

If you are the deductor rather than the recipient, the reconciliation portal used for TDS returns and certificates is where corrections are filed. Deductors who file correction statements promptly save their payees months, and deductors who do not are the reason those refunds are stuck.

Interest is payable on a refund for the period the department held it, calculated under the statute rather than by discretion. It is added automatically to the refund, which is why the amount credited sometimes exceeds the amount claimed.

That interest is itself income and is reportable in the year it is received. It is small, it is easy to forget, and it is visible in the AIS — which makes it an unusually common source of a mismatch notice the following year.

Keep Form 16, Form 16A, interest certificates, the filed return, the acknowledgement and the intimation together for each year. If a question arises three years later, these are what answer it, and reconstructing them from the deductor is far harder than filing them away at the time.

The deadlines that matter are the original due date, the belated and revised return deadline, the window for e-verification, the window for responding to an adjustment intimation, and the period for filing an updated return where something was missed entirely. All of these are set annually or by statute and are revised — check the current dates on the filing portal rather than relying on last year's.

If you have not filed for earlier years and think a refund was due, check whether the return can still be filed at all before assuming the money is recoverable. In many cases the practical answer is that it is not, which is itself a reason to file every year even when no tax is payable.

Finally, the taxpayers' charter published by the department sets out what you are entitled to expect — timely resolution, a fair hearing and reasons for decisions. It is worth citing when a grievance is being ignored, because it is the department's own statement of its obligations.