Beginning April 1, if you have been trading in shares or have substantial dividend income then you no longer can hide this information from the tax department. This is because from the new financial year 2021-22, the taxmann will also get information pertaining to your share trading, transactions in mutual funds, dividend income and post office deposits or deposits with the NBFC. Further such information will also be shown in the new Form 26AS. From April 1, You Need To Make All Such Disclosures In ITR   Until now, taxpayers had been hiding such information on share trading or mutual fund transactions either due to ignorance or to get away with the hassle of computing capital gain or loss on such transactions for the financial year or in order to avoid filing a more complicated return as against ITR 1 or simply to reduce their tax-outgo.

Now the IT department will source all the relevant information direct from your brokerage house, AMC, post office, so it will be difficult for assessees to hide such income source and investments.

What has changed in the Union Budget 2021? In the Budget 2021 announcement finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that ITR forms will henceforth come pre-filled with information including capital gains from listed shares, dividend income, interest income from post office, banks etc. in order to simplify the process of ITR filing. Though till now, taxpayers were able to auto-populate basic details including name, address, PAN, bank details, tax payment, TDS etc.

Further, to implement the proposal, on March 12, 2021, the CBDT came up with the notification which said that a particular category of persons required to furnish SFT or statement of financial transaction under section 285BA of the Income Tax Act and should include information related to capital gains of sale of listed shares or mutual fund units, dividend income together with interest income. And the category of persons defined as per the release are recognised Stock Exchange such as BSE, NSE, depositories, clearing corporation, registrar, share transfer agents, companies distributing dividend, banking companies or a co-operative bank covered under the banking laws, Post Master General defined under the Indian Post Office Act, 1898 and NBFCs.

 And so as the AIS or Annual information statement will have extensive data, taxpayer need to show all such details including salary, interest income, dividend, capital gains from mutual funds and shares in his or her ITR, else severe penalty consequences shall arise.