The Income Tax (I-T) Department will soon start issuing permanent account numbers (PAN) online using details from the Aadhaar database, according to a report by The Times of India.
The electronic PAN (ePan) facility, which will be launched in the next few weeks, will be available free of cost.
During a pilot project of this feature, ePan facility issued 62,000 ePANs over eight days.
Anyone who needs ePAN will need to feed in their Aadhaar number and verify the details using a one-time password (OTP). Since the data provided in Aadhaar such as address, father’s name and date of birth will be accessed online, there will be no requirement to upload any document apart from some basic information.
Once the required data is fed, ePAN is generated that will contain the applicant's digital signature and a QR code, which will capture the demographic data besides photo of the applicant.
As a security measure, the information in the QR code will be encrypted to prevent forgery or digital photoshopping.
“The move is part of greater digitisation of income tax services and aimed at providing the facility without anyone having to visit any office,” an official told the newspaper.
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