Know your PAN Card
The PAN Number is a 10 Alphanumeric number issued in the form of a laminated card, by the Income Tax Department under the Indian Income Tax Act 1961, to any ‘person’ who applies for uniquely identifier of Indian income tax payers.
Fundamental of PAN Number
- IT PAN card is issued under Section 139A of the Income Tax Act.
- The PAN structure is as follows: AAAPL1234C: First five characters are letters, next four numerals, last digit is character letter.
- The first three letters are sequence of alphabets from AAA to ZZZ.
- The fourth character informs about the type of holder of the card. Each holder is uniquely defined as below:
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- A — Association of Persons (AOP)
- B — Body of Individuals (BOI)
- C — Company
- F — Firm
- G — Government
- H — HUF (Hindu Undivided Family)
- L — Local Authority
- J — Artificial Judicial Person
- P — Individual
- T — AOP (Trust)
- The fifth character of the PAN is the first character
- (a) of the surname or last name of the person, in the case of a “Personal” PAN card, where the fourth character is “P” or
- (b) of the name of the Entity, Trust, society, or organisation in the case of Company/ HUF/ Firm/ AOP/ BOI/ Local Authority/ Artificial Jurdical Person/ Govt, where the fourth character is “C”,”H”,”F”,”A”,”T”,”B”,”L”,”J”,”G”.
- The last character is an alphabetic check digit.
Nowadays, the DOI (date of issue) of the PAN card is mentioned at the right (vertical) hand side of the photo on the PAN card.
The central government has introduced a new online service called “Know Your PAN” to verify or validate new and existing PAN numbers.
