Are you still waiting for your income tax refund? It is not enough to present an ITR to obtain it

In case you have not yet received the amount of last year’s income tax refund, please check if the bank account you selected to get the refund is pre-validated or not. This is because since the last evaluation year (i.e. AY 2019-20) it has become mandatory to pre-validate bank accounts to get Electronic Service Credit (ECS) from your account income tax refund.

Therefore, the filing of your income tax return (ITR) is not enough to get the refund of the income tax credited to your bank account, but you must pre-validate the account in which you want to receive the amount.

In case you have any tax refund in the current assessment year (AY 2020-21), make sure that the bank account you are going to select in the ITR, to obtain the credited refund amount, is pre-validated.

In case you have already filed your income statement and selected a bank account, which is not pre-validated, to get the refund amount, you can still visit the income portal taxindiaefiling.gov.in to pre-validate it.

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These are the steps to pre-validate a bank account:

• Login to the incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in portal by entering your PAN, password and captcha code.
• After logging in, select the ‘Prevalidate your bank account’ option in the profile settings tab.
• In case no bank account is pre-validated, you need to enter the details of the bank account (account number, account type, IFSC and contact details, i.e. mobile phone number and email ID) in which you want have your refund amount credited and click the ‘Prevalidate’ button.
• If your PAN is seeded with the bank account in the bank’s database and if your name according to your PAN Card matches your name on the bank account, it will be prevalidated, provided that your mobile phone number and your email identification, seeded with your bank account also matches the mobile phone number and email address registered in the e-filing account.
• In the event that one or more bank accounts are already pre-validated, a list with the pre-validated accounts will open in the “Pre-validate your bank account” option. If you want to get the income tax refund in some other account, you have to click the ‘Add’ button and follow the pre-validation process to pre-validate it.

Prior validation of a bank account is also required, in case you want to electronically verify your ITR through the Electronic Verification Code (EVC). This is because a pre-validated bank account can only be EVC-enabled to receive the one-time password / verification code (OTP).