In line with the announcement made in the Union Budget, union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman formally launched the facility for instant allotment of PAN on Thursday.
This facility is now available for those PAN applicants who possess a valid Aadhaar number and have a mobile number registered with Aadhaar.
The allotment process is paperless and an electronic PAN (e-PAN) is issued to the applicants free of cost.
In the Union Budget 2020, Sitharaman had announced to launch instant PAN facility shortly.
“The facility of instant PAN through Aadhaar based e-KYC has been launched formally today, however, its ‘Beta version’ on a trial basis was started on February 12 on the e-filing website of Income Tax Department,” she said.
“Since then, 6,77,680 instant PANs have been allotted with a turnaround time of about 10 minutes, till May 25,” she added.
She further informed that as of May 25, 2020, a total of 50.52 crore PANs have been allotted to the taxpayers, out of which, around 49.39 crores are allotted to the individuals and more than 32.17crore are seeded with Aadhaar so far.
The instant PAN applicant is required to access the e-filing website of the Income Tax Department to provide her/his valid Aadhaar number and then submit the OTP received on her/his Aadhaar registered mobile number.
On successful completion of this process, a 15-digit acknowledgement number is generated.
If required, the applicant can check the status of the request anytime by providing her/his valid Aadhaar number and on the successful allotment, can download the e-PAN.
The e-PAN is also sent to the applicant on her/his email ID if it is registered with Aadhaar.