Changed your job in the last financial year? Here’s how to get your tax filing in place

• When you join a new job, inform your new employer about your previous salary details.
  
• In your income tax return you have to disclose incomes from both employers.
  
• If your new employer has not deducted TDS, you should advise the employer to do so.
  

If you have changed your job recently, any time before 31 March 2023, you need to be more careful when filing your taxes. This is because you had a salary from the previous employer, and then, almost immediately or with a gap, you have also drawn a salary from your new employer.

Disclose your previous salary details

When someone switches jobs, the new organisation assumes that it is their first employment during the year, and thus they may not consider the older employer salary, and tax deduction, while doing their income and tax computation. “Therefore they give the employer benefits of standard deduction, basic exemption limit, 80C deduction etc all over again, even though it has been considered by the previous employer,” says Archit Gupta, CEO, Clear, a Fintech company. This leads to incorrect computation of income, as well as taxes.

““In his income tax return an employee has to disclose incomes from both employers, aggregate the amount, and get deductions under one category only," says Ved Jain, founder, Ved Jain Associates, a tax consultancy firm. Similarly, when you are claiming HRA etc, you need to take the salary aggregate into consideration, so that your calculator of tax is appropriate.

Jain says that when you join a new job you are supposed to inform your employer about your previous employer, and share details of the salary that you have received during the year from the previous employer. Then the tax will be deducted at an appropriate rate.

Check if your employer is deducting TDS

If his income is taxable, he employee should be careful and check if his employer has deducted TDS from his salary slip.

“If the employer has not deducted tax at source which he was supposed to deduct, he should advise the employer to deduct tax at source and in case that is not done he should pay advance taxes,” says Jain. Otherwise, he may have to pay a huge amount of taxes at one go, and also pay interest under section 234B and 234C.

What to do if an employer is deducting TDS but not submitting to the Government?

In rare cases if the employer deducts TDS and does not pay to the Government, then the employee is losing that entire money for which he has already paid taxes.

What is the remedy? “The employee can find out from his salary slip that the TDS has been deducted, but it will not reflect in his form 26AS.

The employee can then raise a complaint on the income tax portal to his jurisdiction officer that such and such entity had deducted his taxes, but not paid it to the Government. His jurisdiction officer is duty bound to raise this to the employer’s jurisdiction officer, and recover the money from the employer, or take prosecutory action against the employer,” says Vivek Jalan, partner, Tax Connect Advisory.

Hence, disclosing your income from both employers, and computing taxes accordingly is important, if you have changed jobs in the last financial year.