CBDT to validate UDIN from ICAI portal for tax audit reports

New Delhi, Nov 26 : As part of its efforts to curb fake tax audit certifications by non-chartered accountants, the Income Tax Department on Thursday said that its e-filing portal has completed integration with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) portal for validation of Unique Document Identification Number (UDIN).
With this integration, the department would be able to quickly validate the authenticity of CAs and their certifications as the UDIN will give details of the CAs and the documents certified/attested by them.
The ICAI, in its gazette notification dated August 2, 2019, had made generation of UDIN from ICAI website mandatory for every kind of certificate/tax audit report and other attests made by their members as required by various regulators. This was introduced to curb fake certifications by non-CAs misrepresenting themselves as CAs.
A government statement said: “In line with the ongoing initiatives of the Income Tax Department for integrating with other government agencies and bodies, Income Tax e-filing portal has completed its integration with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) portal for validation of Unique Document Identification Number (UDIN) generated from ICAI portal by the Chartered Accountants for documents certified/attested by them.” In consonance with the above requirement, the portal had already factored mandatory quoting of UDIN with effect from April 27 this year for documents certified/attested in compliance with the Income Tax Act, 1961 by a CA.
With this system level integration, UDIN provided for the audit reports/certificates submitted by the CAs in the e-filing portal shall be validated online with the ICAI. This will help in weeding out fake or incorrect Tax Audit Reports not duly authenticated with the ICAI.