Read the TDS Section of Your AIS Carefully — It May Have Entries the SFT Doesn’t
When you open the Annual Information Statement (AIS), it’s natural to go straight to the SFT section first. That’s where the big, high-value transactions sit — property purchases, mutual fund investments, large deposits. It’s the part that usually catches attention.
But the TDS/TCS section deserves an equally careful look, because it can contain transactions that simply aren’t there in the SFT.
To understand why, it helps to know where each of these sections actually gets its information from.
How SFT details come in
SFT stands for Statement of Financial Transaction. It isn’t something you file — it’s filed about you, by banks, mutual fund houses, property registrars, companies, and a few other institutions. The law requires them to report certain high-value transactions to the Income Tax Department once a year.
“High-value” is the key word here. Each type of transaction has its own threshold — for instance, a large cash deposit, a mutual fund purchase above a certain amount, or a property transaction above a certain value. Only transactions that cross these specified limits, in specified categories, get reported through SFT. Anything below the threshold, or outside these categories altogether, never enters the SFT stream — even if it’s genuine income or a genuine transaction.
How TDS details come in
TDS stands for Tax Deducted at Source. This is the tax that gets deducted before you receive certain payments — your employer deducting tax from your salary, a bank deducting tax on interest, a client deducting tax before paying a professional fee, and so on.
Whoever deducts this tax (called the “deductor”) is required to deposit it with the government and report it to the tax department every quarter, through a TDS return. There’s no minimum threshold for this — the moment tax is deducted on a payment, however small, it gets reported. This data then flows into your AIS (and into Form 26AS) once the deductor’s return is processed.
So you can end up seeing things in the TDS section like:
- Small professional or contract payments where TDS was deducted under sections like 194J or 194C, but the amount was too small to trigger SFT reporting
- Interest on smaller deposits where the bank deducted TDS, but the sum didn’t cross the SFT threshold
- Rent or commission payments where the TDS return is the only record of the transaction
- Payments from deductors who file TDS returns regularly but aren’t SFT filers at all
Basically, TDS returns and SFT filings are two separate reporting streams, coming from different types of institutions, feeding AIS independently. They’re not meant to mirror each other, so gaps between the two are expected rather than a sign something’s wrong.
To make this more concrete, here’s the kind of information that typically shows up in the TDS section with no matching entry in the SFT section at all:
| Type of payment | Usual TDS section | Why it may be missing from SFT |
| Professional or technical fees | 194J | Amount often falls below the SFT reporting threshold |
| Contractor payments | 194C | Same — too small to qualify as an SFT transaction |
| Rent paid to a landlord | 194I / 194IB | No SFT category covers routine rent payments |
| Commission or brokerage | 194H | No SFT category covers this type of payment |
| Interest on smaller deposits | 194A | Below the interest amount SFT tracks |
| Payments from smaller or occasional deductors | Various | The deductor may not be an SFT filer at all |
In one instance, an assessee had interest on fixed deposits reflected in the TDS section of the AIS, deducted and reported by the bank under section 194A — but the same interest didn’t show up anywhere in the SFT section. Assuming that meant it didn’t need to be reported separately, he went ahead and filed his return without including it, and ended up filing the wrong ITR for his actual income profile that year. The mismatch surfaced later, and he had to go back and file a revised return to correct it. The interest was in the AIS all along — just in the TDS section, not the SFT section, which is exactly the kind of gap this article is about.
What to do with this while filing
The useful habit here is to treat the TDS section as a source of income information, not just a tax-credit reference.
A few steps that help:
- Go through the TDS/TCS entries individually — not just the total credit figure that feeds Form 26AS.
- Match each entry to the income head it relates to — interest, professional fees, rent, commission, etc.
- If an entry doesn’t have a corresponding line in the SFT section or in your own books, check it — it may be income that still needs to go into the return.
- Check the deductor’s TAN and section code — it tells you what kind of payment triggered the deduction, which makes it easier to place correctly.
Doing this protects the TDS credit itself, since credit claims are harder to defend if the matching income wasn’t reported, and it also catches income that might otherwise slip through simply because no other document mentioned it.
The point of doing this
AIS is meant to give a wider view of the year’s financial activity than Form 26AS did on its own, and the TDS section is part of why. It picks up transactions that fall outside the SFT’s scope, so going through it line by line is worth the time before filing.