Know Your 'PAN'

Permanent Account Number or simply PAN  is a ten-digit alphanumeric number, issued in the form of a printed plastic [earlier days, it was paper printed & laminated] card, by the Income Tax Department [Government of India], to any “Indian-national applicant” who applies for it or in some cases to whom the department allots the number without an application.

An example of how a PAN card looks like.

PAN enables the department to link all transactions of the “person” with the department. These transactions include tax payments, TDS / TCS credits, returns of income / wealth / gift / FBT, specified transactions, correspondence, and so on. PAN, thus, acts as an identifier for the “person” with the tax department.

PAN was introduced to facilitates linking of various documents, including payment of taxes, assessment, tax demand, tax arrears etc. relating to an assessee, to facilitate easy retrieval of information and to facilitate matching of information relating to investment, raising of loans and other business activities of taxpayers collected through various sources, both internal as well as external, for detecting and combating tax evasion and widening of tax base.

A typical PAN, for example looks like this. ABCPE1234Z.

• First three characters i.e. 'ABC' in the above PAN are alphabetic series running from AAA to ZZZ
• Fourth character of PAN i.e. 'P' in the above PAN represents the status of the PAN holder. 'P' stands for Individual, 'F' stands for Firm, 'C' stands for Company, 'H' stands for HUF, 'A' stands for AOP, 'T' stands for TRUST etc. [refer the table below for better understanding]
• Fifth character i.e. 'E' in the above PAN represents first character of the PAN holder’s last name/surname.
• Next four characters i.e. '1234' in the above PAN are sequential number running from 0001 to 9999.
• Last character i.e. 'Z' in the above PAN is an alphabetic check digit.

	Status of Assessee	Fourth Character of PAN
1.	Individual Person	P
2.	Hindu Undivided Family	H
3.	Firm / Limited Liability Partnership	F
4.	Association of Persons [AOP]	A
5.	Body Of Individuals[BOI]	B
6.	Company	C
7.	Trust [AOP]	T
8.	Local Authority	L
9.	Artificial Judicial Person	J
10.	Government	G

To obtain a PAN, one has to submit the filled application form,

Note: Only one PAN should be obtained in any case of the above assessee. Any possession of more than one PAN is an offense, and if already obtained more than one - the additional have to be surrendered back to Income Tax Department.