AMCHAM participated in an interactive session on February 9th with Mr. Ravi Agrawal, Chairman, CBDT,  on the draft rules and forms of the Income Tax Rules. Mr Rohinton Sidhwa, Co- Chairman – Taxation Tariff & Regulatory Affairs Committee, AMCHAM and Partner, Taxation, Deloitte and Wg Cdr Rajiv Anand, Senior Director, AMCHAM attended the session. The Chairman CBDT highlighted that IT Act 25 has facilitated consolidation of and simplification in language. Procedural changes have been announced in Union Budget 2026 and will add to India’s growth story. He brought out that it is the effort of Departments now to clearly capture information and data from tax payers. Towards this, rules have been reduced from 511 to 333 and forms have been reduced from 399 to 190, with the intent of simplifying existing processes. He stressed that this is an opportunity for suggestions towards filling any gaps that may still exist in the revised rules and forms before the rules are notified. Enhanced focus remains on re-engineering of rules and forms, standardization of forms, smart forms, removal of legal ambiguity, alignment of rules, reducing compliance, enhanced ease of doing business, and removing redundancy from existing provisions. With these changes, it is expected that data inconsistency will be minimised. Rules and forms placed in public domain will be available till February 22nd, 2026 here: https://incometaxindia.gov.in/news/draft-income-tax-forms-2026.htm  Feedback has been sought online on the draft rules and forms at the earliest. Members are requested to share their feedback directly through the portal. However, since the max limit of 500 words has been prescribed for description of suggestions, in exceptional cases where the description requires more than 500 words, members may share the same to AMCHAM by February 15^th for collation and onward submission to CBDT.