13 crore yet to link PAN with Aadhaar

New Delhi: About 48 crore individual Permanent Account Numbers (PANs), out of the total 61 crore issued till now, have been linked with Aadhaar till date and those who do not link it by the declared deadline of March 31 will not get benefits while undertaking various business and tax-related activities, CBDT Chairperson Nitin Gupta said.

The government has made the linkage of the two databases mandatory and declared that those individual PANs that are not attached to the Aadhaar by the end of this financial year (March 31, 2023) will be rendered inoperative. A fee of Rs 1,000 will be payable for those who want to link their PAN and Aadhaar between now and March 31.

"There are about 61 crore individual PANs issued till now and out of this, around 48 crore have been seeded with Aadhaar. The difference is around 13 crore now, including the exempt category, and we hope the rest will also be linked by the end date," Gupta said. The CBDT chief said the Budget announcement of making PAN a "common identifier" will be "beneficial" for the business sector.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech made on February 1, had said that PAN will now be a common identifier for business establishments for digital systems of government agencies. A circular issued by the CBDT on March 30 said once a PAN becomes inoperative, an individual shall be liable to all the consequences under the Act (I-T Act) and will have to suffer a number of implications like: