What to do when CPC proposes a prima facie adjustment under Section 143(1)(a) to your ITR

You filed your income-tax return in July 2025, expected a refund of a few thousand rupees, and instead an email from the Centralised Processing Centre (CPC) at Bengaluru landed in your inbox with the subject line "Communication of proposed adjustment u/s 143(1)(a)". The figure the department wants to add does not match what you typed into your ITR, and you have exactly 30 days to react before the adjustment becomes final. This guide walks through what that intimation means, what the Income-tax Act 1961 actually permits CPC to do at this stage, and how to respond variance by variance on the e-filing portal.

The Scenario

A prima facie adjustment is the automated first pass every return goes through after you e-verify it. CPC's system cross-checks your ITR against Form 16, Form 26AS, the Annual Information Statement (AIS) and the tax audit report, and where a figure is inconsistent it proposes a correction under Section 143(1)(a) before finalising the summary assessment. The reader in our example is a salaried professional who declared a gross salary of Rs 14,00,000 for FY 2024-25 but left out Rs 40,000 of fixed-deposit interest that the bank had already reported in Form 26AS, so CPC flagged the omission and proposed adding it back.

The intimation you receive at this point is only a proposal, not a demand. Under the proviso to Section 143(1)(a), CPC must give you an opportunity to respond in writing, and it must consider your reply before making any adjustment. The critical trap is silence: the same proviso states that where no response is received within 30 days of the issue of the intimation, the proposed adjustment "shall be made", so a missed deadline converts a proposal into a final figure with interest attached.

Six categories of variance can be raised at this stage, and it helps to know which bucket your notice falls into. The table below maps each clause of Section 143(1)(a) to the mismatch it targets, drawn from the statute as published on indiacode.nic.in.

Our reader's FD interest sits squarely in clause (vi), the most common trigger, because the Rs 40,000 was visible in Form 26AS but absent from the ITR.

Statutory Answer

Section 143(1) is the provision under which the department processes your return and issues an intimation, and Section 143(1)(a) is the sub-clause that authorises the six adjustments listed above. Two procedural safeguards written into the section are worth committing to memory. First, the first proviso requires that an intimation of the proposed adjustment be given to you in writing, electronically, before it is applied. Second, the second proviso fixes the 30-day response window that runs from the date the intimation is issued, per the text on incometax.gov.in.

There is also an outer limit on when this whole exercise can happen. Following the amendment made by the Finance Act 2021, an intimation under Section 143(1) cannot be sent after nine months from the end of the financial year in which the return is furnished. For a return filed during FY 2025-26, that clock runs out on 31 December 2026, so a 143(1)(a) proposal arriving after that date for such a return would be time-barred.

Responding is not optional housekeeping. If you genuinely omitted the income, agreeing early keeps interest under Sections 234B and 234C from compounding, since interest runs at 1% per month on the shortfall of advance tax. If CPC has it wrong, a reasoned disagreement filed within the 30 days forces the system to consider your explanation before any addition, which is your cheapest line of defence and far simpler than a later rectification under Section 154.

Worked Resolution

The e-Proceedings manual sets out the exact click-path. Log in at incometax.gov.in, open Dashboard, then Pending Actions, then e-Proceedings, then Self; open the Notice or Letter PDF, click Submit Response, and mark each flagged variance as Agree or Disagree. You save each variance, tick the declaration, and submit; a Transaction ID and an email confirmation follow, and the response cannot be edited once submitted, so review every line before the final click.

Now the arithmetic, because the number that matters is the extra tax the adjustment creates, not the size of the income added. Our reader filed under the new regime for FY 2024-25 with a gross salary of Rs 14,00,000 and the Rs 75,000 standard deduction, giving a declared total income of Rs 13,25,000. CPC's clause (vi) proposal adds Rs 40,000 of Form 26AS interest, lifting the revised total income to Rs 13,65,000. Because the total income exceeds Rs 12,00,000, the Section 87A rebate does not apply in either version, so the whole slab difference is payable.

The addition of Rs 40,000 therefore costs an extra Rs 6,240 in tax and cess, before any Section 234B or 234C interest on the shortfall. You can reproduce this slab maths for your own figures with the income-tax calculator, test whether the old regime would have softened the blow using the old vs new regime comparison, and confirm what your deductor already reported against your TDS using the TDS calculator.

If the reader agrees, the revised Rs 88,140 liability crystallises, any refund is recomputed downward, and the intimation under Section 143(1) doubles as a notice of demand under Section 156 for the balance. If the reader disagrees because, say, the Rs 40,000 belonged to a joint account and was fully taxed in a spouse's return, they select Disagree, choose the reason such as "income is not taxable" or "already offered to tax", attach the explanation, and CPC must weigh it before finalising. Where an adjustment is wrongly applied despite a valid response, a rectification request under Section 154 remains available, and any resulting refund carries interest under Section 244A at 0.5% per month.

FAQ

What happens if I ignore the 30-day deadline?

Under the second proviso to Section 143(1)(a), if no response is received within 30 days of the issue of the intimation, the proposed adjustment is made automatically. Your return is then processed with the addition included, tax and 4% cess are recomputed, and any refund is reduced or a demand under Section 156 is raised, so ignoring the notice is the single most expensive option.

Is the proposed adjustment the same as a Section 143(2) scrutiny notice?

No. A Section 143(1)(a) proposal is an automated, arithmetic-level correction handled entirely by CPC, whereas a Section 143(2) notice opens a detailed scrutiny assessment where an assessing officer examines your books. The 143(2) notice must be served within three months from the end of the financial year in which the return was filed, a separate and much wider process.

Can I revise my return instead of responding to the intimation?

If the due date for a revised return under Section 139(5) has not passed, filing a revised return to include the omitted income is a valid route, and for FY 2024-25 returns the revised-return window runs up to 31 December 2025. If that date has passed, you must respond through the e-Proceedings tab and, where needed, pay the shortfall as self-assessment tax under Section 140A.

Does agreeing to the adjustment attract a penalty?

Agreeing to a genuine omission triggers the extra tax plus interest under Sections 234B and 234C at 1% per month, but a 143(1)(a) addition by itself does not automatically levy a penalty under Section 270A. Under-reporting penalties of 50% of tax generally arise in scrutiny or reassessment, not in this summary-processing stage, though voluntary correction always reads better on the record.

The interest CPC added does not appear in my AIS. Where do I check it?

Interest income reported by banks appears in both Form 26AS and the Annual Information Statement, viewable under the Services tab on incometax.gov.in. Reconcile every entry there against your bank statements before you Agree, because AIS occasionally double-counts or misclassifies entries, and a documented mismatch is a legitimate ground to Disagree.

How long does CPC take to process my response?

There is no fixed statutory turnaround for processing a 143(1)(a) response, but the overall intimation under Section 143(1) itself must issue within nine months from the end of the financial year in which the return was furnished, i.e. by 31 December 2026 for an FY 2025-26 filing. Once your response is considered, a final intimation reflecting the accepted or rejected variance is sent to your registered email.

Can I still claim a deduction I forgot, in my response?

The 143(1)(a) response screen lets you Agree or Disagree with CPC's proposed variances; it is not a channel to introduce a fresh deduction you never claimed. A missed deduction has to go through a revised return under Section 139(5) if the window is open, or a rectification under Section 154 where the error is apparent from the record, not through the proposed-adjustment reply.