Annual Information Statement
The Annual Information Statement (AIS) is a comprehensive statement introduced by the Income Tax Department in November 2021 that consolidates all financial information reported about a taxpayer from multiple sources — including securities transactions, mutual fund redemptions, dividend credits, and foreign remittances — enabling pre-filling and verification for ITR filing.
AIS was introduced as an upgrade over Form 26AS, which captured only tax-related information (TDS, TCS, advance tax). AIS aggregates transaction-level data from a far wider array of reporting entities: stock exchanges (equity and F&O transactions), depositories (securities acquisitions and holdings), registrar and transfer agents (mutual fund purchases and redemptions), banks (savings account interest, fixed deposit interest, cash deposits and withdrawals above threshold), insurance companies, and foreign remittance intermediaries.
For equity investors, AIS typically includes every STT-paid securities transaction executed during the year, reported by the stock exchange via the SFT (Statement of Financial Transactions) mechanism. Each transaction includes details of the security, quantity, transaction value, and counterparty. Mutual fund transactions reported by RTAs (CAMS and KFintech) include purchase, redemption, switch, and dividend data for each folio.
The AIS is accessible via the AIS/TIS module on the income tax e-filing portal. It presents a Taxpayer Information Summary (TIS), which aggregates AIS data into categories used in ITR pre-fill. Taxpayers can submit online feedback on each information item — marking entries as 'Information is correct,' 'Information is not fully correct,' 'Information relates to another PAN/year,' or 'Information is duplicate.' The feedback mechanism allows taxpayers to flag incorrect data, though the actual correction must still come from the reporting entity.
A significant practical issue is that AIS often shows gross proceeds from securities sales without corresponding purchase cost data, making the AIS capital gains figures unreliable for actual ITR computation. The correct capital gains must be computed using actual purchase prices from broker records or CAMS/KFintech statements, and these may differ from AIS figures due to corporate actions, bonus shares, rights issues, or split adjustments not captured in SFT reporting.
The income tax department uses AIS data to generate AI-driven e-Campaign notices and Compliance Portal queries, alerting taxpayers to discrepancies between AIS information and their ITR. Proactively reconciling AIS data with personal records before filing — and using the online feedback mechanism for genuine errors — significantly reduces the risk of post-filing scrutiny and notices.