The AIS is the income tax department's detailed statement of your financial transactions for the year, compiled from banks, mutual funds, registrars, employers and other reporters. It goes well beyond Form 26AS, covering interest, dividends, securities trades, property deals and more. The department uses it to cross-check your return, so unexplained gaps invite notices.
Reporting entities feed transaction data against your PAN throughout the year: savings and FD interest, dividend credits, share and mutual fund purchases and redemptions, property purchases and sales, rent received where reported, and foreign remittances. The portal shows both the raw reported value and a processed value, and a simplified summary called the TIS. Since the department's automated matching runs on this data, the AIS is effectively what the assessing systems believe your financial year looked like.
Before filing, log in to the e-filing portal, open AIS, and walk every line item against your books. Small businesses most often find surprises in interest across multiple bank accounts, dividends on old holdings, and mutual fund switches that count as redemptions. If an entry is wrong — duplicated, someone else's, or wrongly valued — submit feedback against that line on the portal itself rather than silently ignoring it.
The mistake that generates notices: filing from memory or from last year's template while the AIS shows income you skipped. A mismatch can surface as an intimation under section 270(1), a request for information, or worse a reassessment under sections 279 to 282 of the 2025 Act. Ten minutes of AIS reconciliation is the cheapest notice-prevention available.
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Reviewed to the law in force in FY 2026-27. General information, not advice — confirm the position for your facts before acting.