A taxpayer needs to disclose all the details in the Income Tax Return (ITR) that are relevant for computing one’s total income earned. While information regarding salary income may be found in Form 16 and information regarding interest on Fixed Deposit (FD) etc may be found in Form 16A, it is difficult to gather the details for those incomes, where no tax is deducted at source (TDS).

To get all the information related to income and tax, taxpayers use to download Form 26AS. However, Form 26A mostly contains those income details, where tax has been deducted as TDS.

So, Form 26AS fails to reveal most of the non-TDS incomes – like interest on Savings Bank Account, Dividend, Capital Gains on sale of capital goods like property, shares, mutual fund (MF) units, dividend etc. As a result, even after downloading Form 26AS, taxpayers need to collect that information separately, which 26AS fails to reveal.

To overcome the problem and to make filing of return of income easier for the taxpayers, the Annual Information Statement (AIS) has been introduced, which aims to contain almost all the information needed to file an ITR.

So, after the introduction of AIS, Form 26AS will lose its relevance to an extent.

Will Form 26AS be stopped?

For now, it will not be stopped and a taxpayer can access both Form 26AS and AIS simultaneously. So, you will find it very easy to know and submit details for your ITR.

How to access your AIS?

To download the AIS –

• First log in to your income tax account in incometax.gov.in site.
• Then go to Services Tab and select the AIS option from the dropdown.
• On selecting the AIS option, a new tab will open with two options – Tax Information Summary (TIS) on the left side of the page and AIS on the right side.

You may download both TIS and AIS as both contain the same information, but in summary form in TIS and in details in AIS.

The statements may be downloaded in PDF or JPEG format. The password to open the statement will be your PAN Number (in CAPITAL) followed by your Date of Birth (DDMMYYYY) without any space or sign.

Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/money/income-tax/income-tax-return-how-to-download-annual-information-statement-to-make-itr-filing-easy/2369746/