New income tax bill: Parliamentary panel to table its report in Lok Sabha on July 21
The 31-member Select Committee, chaired by BJP leader Baijayant Panda, was appointed by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to scrutinise The new Income Tax Bill, 2025, which was introduced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 13 in the Lok Sabha.
The Committee has made 285 suggestions and at its meeting on July 16 adopted the report on new I-T Bill, 2025, which will now be tabled in the House for further action.
The simplified Income Tax Bill, which is half the size of the 1961 Income Tax Act, seeks to achieve tax certainty by minimising the scope of litigation and fresh interpretation.
The new bill, introduced in the Lok Sabha, has a word count of 2.6 lakh, lower than 5.12 lakh in the I-T Act. The number of sections is 536, as against 819 effective sections in the existing law.
The number of chapters has also been halved to 23 from 47, according to the FAQs (frequently asked questions) issued by the I-T department.
The Income Tax Bill 2025 has 57 tables, compared to 18 in the existing Act and removed 1,200 provisos and 900 explanations.
Provisions relating to exemptions and TDS/TCS have been made crispier in the Bill by putting them in a tabular format, while the chapter for not-for-profit organisations has been made comprehensive with use of plain language. As a result of this, the word count has come down by 34,547.
In a taxpayer-friendly move, the Bill replaces the term 'previous year' as mentioned in the Income Tax Act, 1961 with 'tax year'. Also, the concept of assessment year has been done away with.
Currently, for income earned in the previous year (say 2023-24), tax is paid in assessment year (say 2024-25). This previous year and assessment year (AY) concept has been removed and only tax year under the simplified bill has been brought in.
While introducing the Bill in the Lok Sabha, Sitharaman had said that "substantial changes" have been made in the Bill. The number of words have been halved from 5.12 lakh, and sections reduced from 819 to 236.
Following introduction, the Bill was referred to the select committee of the Lok Sabha and the committee was mandated to submit its report by the first day of next session.
The Monsoon session of Parliament is scheduled to sit from July 21 to August 21, 2025.
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