AIS vs Form 26AS vs TIS: The Complete ITR Mismatch Guide (AY 2026-27)

Why This One Mix-Up Generates Lakhs of Notices Every Year

Every ITR season, a predictable pattern repeats on the income-tax portal: a taxpayer opens their account expecting one tax-credit figure, and instead finds three different-looking statements — Form 26AS, AIS and TIS — each reporting numbers that don't quite line up. Since these three documents feed directly into return pre-filling and into the department's automated matching engine, a taxpayer who doesn't understand what each one legally represents ends up either under-reporting income by accident, over-claiming TDS credit, or panicking over a duplicate entry that isn't even real income.

This confusion isn't accidental — it's the result of a genuine statutory evolution. Form 26AS, AIS and TIS have overlapping histories, share a common legal parent in Section 285BB of the Income-tax Act, 1961, and yet today serve three distinct, non-interchangeable purposes. If you are filing your return for AY 2026-27 (see our complete ITR filing guide for AY 2026-27 and how to pick the correct ITR form), reconciling all three before you file is no longer optional diligence — it is the single most effective step to avoid a notice.

Form 26AS: The Tax-Credit Statement, Explained

Form 26AS began life under the erstwhile Section 203AA and Rule 31AB purely as a TDS/TCS reconciliation statement. Budget 2020 inserted Section 285BB, and CBDT Notification No. 30/2020 replaced Rule 31AB with Rule 114-I, folding Form 26AS into the same statutory family that later gave birth to AIS. For a short period, Form 26AS itself briefly displayed the wider AIS-style data. That changed from Assessment Year 2023-24: the department confirmed, in its own AIS FAQs, that Form 26AS on the TRACES portal now displays only TDS/TCS-related data, while everything else lives in AIS.

Practically, this means Form 26AS today contains: tax deducted at source on your salary, interest, rent, professional fees or property sale; tax collected at source; advance tax and self-assessment tax you have paid; and any refund issued along with interest on that refund. It does not, by itself, tell you whether you've correctly reported your capital gains, dividend income or high-value transactions — that is AIS's job.

Access is via the e-filing portal's 'e-File → Income Tax Returns → View Form 26AS' link, which redirects to TRACES. Because it is compiled from the deductor's quarterly TDS/TCS returns, a March-quarter deduction typically appears only after the deductor files its Q4 statement — due by 31st May — so entries can lag by several weeks into the new financial year.

AIS (Annual Information Statement): The Complete Financial Picture

AIS, introduced under the same Section 285BB and Rule 114-I, is the Income Tax Department's consolidated financial profile of a taxpayer — built from data supplied by banks, employers, mutual fund houses, registrars, stock exchanges, depositories, GST authorities and foreign tax administrations. It exists to let the taxpayer see, before filing, virtually everything the department already knows about their financial year.

AIS is structured in two parts. Part A carries basic profile information — PAN, masked Aadhaar, name, date of birth, contact details. Part B is the substantive section and typically covers: TDS/TCS information; Specified Financial Transactions (SFT) reported under Section 285BA and Rule 114E, such as high-value cash deposits, property purchases above ₹30 lakh, and credit-card payments; payment of taxes (advance tax, self-assessment tax); demand and refund details; pending and completed proceedings; and 'other information' — interest on income-tax refund, outward foreign remittances, GST turnover, dividend, mutual fund transactions, off-market share transfers, and (for AY 2026-27) foreign asset data received under CRS/FATCA exchange.

TIS (Taxpayer Information Summary): Processed vs Derived Value

TIS is not a separate legal instrument with its own charging section — it is a category-wise, deduplicated roll-up of AIS data, generated purely for convenience and for pre-filling the ITR. For every income head (say, 'Interest from savings bank'), TIS shows two figures: the 'Processed Value', which is the system's cleaned-up aggregate of what all reporting entities submitted, and the 'Derived Value', which additionally accounts for any feedback the taxpayer has submitted against individual AIS entries.

It is the Derived Value in TIS — not the raw AIS entry, and not Form 26AS — that populates the pre-filled fields when you open the ITR utility. This is precisely why submitting AIS feedback matters even before you look at the ITR form: correcting AIS first means the pre-fill you eventually see is already closer to accurate.

Looking Ahead: Form 168 and the Income-tax Act, 2025

The Income-tax Act, 2025 received Presidential assent and came into force from 1st April 2026, replacing the Income-tax Act, 1961 and introducing the unified concept of a 'Tax Year' in place of the earlier financial year/assessment year split. Under the new Act, the provision equivalent to Section 285BB has been renumbered as Section 510, read with Rule 245 of the Draft Income-tax Rules, 2026, and the prescribed form is now called Form No. 168.

Importantly, this is largely a renumbering and terminology exercise rather than a substantive redesign — the seven information categories, the feedback mechanism and the underlying reporting-entity structure remain conceptually the same. For income earned during FY 2025-26, however, the return is filed for AY 2026-27 entirely under the old Act, and the applicable statement remains Form 26AS/AIS under Section 285BB. Form 168 becomes relevant only for Tax Year 2026-27 income — meaning returns you will file in 2027 onward. If you're also weighing regime choices for this transition period, our old vs new tax regime 2026 comparison may help with the broader planning picture.