Section 44AB provides that every person, who is required to get his accounts audited for any previous year by an Accountant before the specified date should furnish by that date the report of such audit in the prescribed form duly signed and verified by such accountant setting forth such particulars as may be prescribed.
Uploaded Tax Audit Report to be digitally signed
Form No 3CA or Form No 3CB as the case may be and Form No 3CD are required to be uploaded on the website of the Income tax department and should be digitally signed by the Auditors. The assessee is required to accept the tax audit report under his digital signature. The provisions of Information Technology Act, 2000 assume importance in this regard. It is important to note that these forms do not state that they have to be signed digitally or electronically. It is only proviso to Rule 12(2) of Income-tax Rules, 1962 which prescribes that where an assessee is required to furnish a report of audit specified under Section 44AB, he shall furnish the same electronically. Thus ,the primary responsibility of furnishing the report electronically lies with the assessee.
In this regard, Section 5 and 6 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 gives legal recognition to the electronic or digital signature. It is also relevant to note that electronic signature is a wider term defined in section 2(1)(ta) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and includes digital signature which is separately defined in Section 2(1)(p) of the said Act. The forms are required to be uploaded with digital signature.
It should be kept in mind by the Tax Auditor that the time and date of signature is automatically captured whenever the electronic signature is affixed and this date should tally with the manual date if any written in the hard copy of the Form No 3CA, 3CB and 3CD as the case may be.
Approved by the Assessee
The procedure laid down in Rule 12 requires furnishing of tax audit report by the Assessee on the Income-tax e-filing website. These forms are required to be uploaded on the website of the Income-tax
Department by the Tax Auditor, which are later on approved by the assessee.
Variation in contents as prescribed in Rules vis-a-vis available on e-filing web site
There are certain variations in the contents of Form No. 3CD prescribed under the Rules and available on the e-fling web site. Where Tax Audit Report has been furnished in accordance with the forms available in the Income-tax Rules, 1962, answers to certain clauses may not be exact response to the clause as stated in the Schema. However, this variation cannot be held against the Tax Auditor, as development of schema is not within his control and there is no specific option to issue the Tax Audit Report by the auditor as per the notified Form 3CD. Moreover, this fact has been brought to the notice of the CBDT by the DTC. Thus, where there is variation in any clause, it would be impossible to respond as per Form prescribed in the Rules.
Uploading in case of joint auditors
In case of Joint Auditor(s), the present Income-tax filing options do not provide for modalities of uploading of report by all the joint auditors and in such a situation, it will be appropriate that the hard copy of the report duly signed in the manner above is given to the assessee client and a consolidated report is uploaded by one of the Auditors with a disclosure in this regard from the Joint Auditor(s).
SA 700 paras and UDIN insertion:
At present, there is no specific place to mention paragraphs expected of SA 700, no mechanism to compulsory insert UDIN prior to uploading the forms on the Income-tax website and thus UDIN should be written in the hard copy of Form 3CA/3CB and thereafter the copy as stated above should be given to the auditee.
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