Let’s first understand a brief about UDIN and why was it needed?
It has been noticed that financial documents/ certificates attested by third person misrepresenting themselves as CA Members are misleading the Authorities and Stakeholders. ICAI is also receiving number of complaints of signatures of CAs being forged by non CAs. To curb the malpractices, the Professional Development Committee of ICAI has implemented in phased manner an innovative concept of UDIN i.e. Unique Document Identification Number. All Certificates are being made mandatory with effect from 1st February, 2019 as per the Council decision taken at its 379th Meeting held on 17th – 18th December, 2018.
Chartered Accountants having full-time Certificate of Practice can register on UDIN Portal and generate UDIN by registering the certificates attested/certified by them.
Thus, with UDIN a Chartered Accountant not only got power and great value of it’s certification but with great power they also got great responsibility as now anyone can validate and check UDIN and UDIN cannot be generated by anyone other than that Chartered Accountant as it needs OTP and thus it is difficult to generate fake UDIN.
Therefore now in case of any wrong certification a CA could be held easily responsible based on the UDIN.
Till date while filing Audit forms i.e. Form 3CB, 3CEB or Form 15CB or any such form which needs to be submitted by Chartered accountants on E-filing website one used to just generate UDIN and mention it on the document and if AO had any doubt he could verify it manually.
However, in past few months e-filing website of Income tax department has integrated facility of validate UDIN and now in a seminar of ICAI it was made mandatory to validate UDIN and only when UDIN is validated the document or audit report will be considered as submitted.
As we know tax audit due dates are arriving and during the peak time it is very difficult to generate UDIN immediately and hence it has told that one can validate UDIN within 15 days of filing of any Form or statement on e-filing website.
However only when the Form is validated with UDIN then only it will be considered as submitted and that needs to be done within 15 days.
Many people regularly issue Form 15CB and might be not aware of such thing but now they must go and check whether all the Forms issued have been validated with UDIN or not.
There are 2 ways to validate the document: One is at the time of filing the document and another way is to validate the same later by logging in to e-filing website and under My Account you will find an option of validate UDIN which is as under:
Last year the due date to generate UDIN for extended to 30 days during Tax audit period, however as of now no such extension has been provided for this year and hence for tax audit also one needs to generate UDIN within 15 days and validate the same on e-filing website within 15 days of generation or else it won’t be considered as submitted.
Webinar of ICAI on same: Webinar on youtube
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