At least five frontier AI models shipped in the nine days to 29 September. On the eighth of those days, the Central Board of Direct Taxes gave India’s audited taxpayers twenty-one more days.
Both announcements reached my WhatsApp groups with the same laughing emoji.
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2006. I have applauded more of these extensions than I would like to admit in writing, and I have spent the extra weeks exactly the way I spent the original ones. Read what follows as a confession first and a critique second.
Two timelines
The first one ran for nine days.
21 September: Grok 4.7.
22 September: GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5.
28 September: Claude Sonnet 5.5.
29 September: GPT-6.1 Sol.
That last release, OpenAI says, comes close to its flagship GPT-6 Astra on coding, computer use and professional work, at one-fifth of Astra’s standard token price. Astra launched on 3 September as the ceiling. Twenty-six days later, near-Astra work was on sale at a fifth of the price. “State of the art” now has a shelf life shorter than a GSTR-3B cycle.
One small comfort for our profession: Grok 4.7 was publicly promised on 2 September as arriving “in 10 days”, and it did not. The frontier also takes extensions.
The second timeline ends this week. On 28 September 2026, CBDT extended the due date of the Return of Income for AY 2026-27, for assessees under clause (a) of Explanation 2 to section 139(1), from 31 October to 21 November 2026. The specified date for the tax audit report moved with it, from 30 September to 21 October 2026.
Two days’ notice. By the standards of this ritual, that is generous.
Fourteen Septembers
“Every single year” is how it feels. So I went back through the orders. Here is the 30 September tax audit date, as far back as I have checked.
2013: extended to 31 October.
2014: to 30 November.
2015: to 31 October.
2016: to 17 October.
2017: to 31 October, then 7 November.
2018: to 31 October, in two steps.
2019: to 31 October.
2020: to 15 January 2021.
2021: to 15 February 2022.
2022: to 7 October.
2023: held.
2024: to 7 October, by a circular dated 29 September.
2025: to 31 October, then 10 November.
2026: to 21 October.
Thirteen of fourteen. Take out the two pandemic years and it is still eleven of twelve. The statutory deadline has become an opening bid.
The July date for non-audit returns has its own record, including 2013, 2020 and 2025. The 2025 version deserves a sentence of its own: the date moved to 15 September by a circular issued in May, then to 16 September by a circular dated 15 September. A one-day extension, issued on the due date itself.
Now look at 2023, the one exception. The one year CBDT held the date, the date held. I don’t recall the profession, the portal or the clients being noticeably better that year than in 2022 or 2024. What differed was the expectation.
And when CBDT granted the first audit extension in 2025, it also said the e-filing portal was running smoothly, with over 4.02 lakh audit reports uploaded by 24 September and 60,000 of them on that single day. Portal working. Deadline moved anyway.
The strongest objection
Practitioners will push back here, and they deserve a fair hearing. The best argument, made in TaxGuru on 10 September, is that the date itself is badly designed. It sets two deadlines a month apart for outputs drawn from the same balance sheet. Forms and utilities change late. And extensions reward the firms that waited, while the ones that hired temporary staff and worked nights get nothing.
I agree with most of that, especially the last part. Every extension is a small fine paid by the disciplined and a small dividend paid to the late.
But a better-designed date only moves the question. If every party in the chain still expects relief, a 31 October date will be extended to 21 November just as reliably. Design fixes the calendar. It does not fix the belief.
Three capitals, three habits
Indonesia handled its own crunch this year without touching the statute:
31 March: the statutory individual SPT date.
30 April: the statutory corporate date under Article 3(3)(c) of the KUP Law, the last day of the individual penalty waiver under KEP-55/PJ/2026, and the day KEP-71/PJ/2026 was signed.
31 May: the corporate date that actually applied, with fines and interest waived.
The Coretax transition was the reason, and a fair one. It will not be the reason in April 2027, and Coretax keeps the timestamps.
Singapore sets Form C-S and Form C at 30 November every year, describes that as at least eleven months from the close of accounts, and names composition or summons as the consequence of missing it. The slack is designed in advance. The date then behaves like a real date.
Singapore tells you how. India tells you how fast: twenty-one days, announced with two to spare. Indonesia tells you what it costs: relief signed on the deadline day, and a filing culture that learns to wait for the next decree.
Where the September time actually goes
Every tax audit I have watched slip follows the same sequence. Ledgers close late because the finance team was running GST and TDS returns in parallel. Balance confirmations and the fixed-asset register arrive in the second week of September.
For companies, the board approves the accounts just in time for the 30 September AGM under section 96 of the Companies Act, 2013, and the tax audit queues behind the statutory audit. The audit team, carrying a dozen clients with the same date, reviews in bulk. Form 3CD clauses wait on data that nobody was told they owned.
Now ask which of those steps GPT-6.1 Sol, or any of the other four, removes. A model can draft the 3CD working, reconcile GSTR-2B to the purchase register, match 26AS to the TDS ledger, and flag section 40(a)(ia) exposure before the auditor opens the file. I have spent seven months building an open-source tool that drafts GST notice replies, so I am not the person who will tell you the machine is a toy.
Here is what changes. Today, a late tax audit can be blamed on volume: too many reconciliations, too few hands. Once a model does the reconciliation in an hour, that explanation expires. The delay that remains belongs to a date someone chose: when the books closed, when the auditor started, when the board asked.
I still know a bunch of auditors who keep asking “tally back-up” rather than “I’m fine with an accountant access (it costs free) from ZOHO Books or ERP” to initiate & complete seamlessly the audit.
The enterprise committee still debating whether to approve ChatGPT will also meet this month to review the tax audit. In neither meeting is the software the constraint.
Five signatures, one habit
An extension is a shared subsidy. Every party in the chain draws a little from it, so nobody has a reason to be first to stop.
Every September, five parties negotiate a deadline none of them intends to meet: the client who closes books late, the auditor who starts late, the board that reviews late, the officer who expects the rush, and the ministry that grants the extension. AI can speed up each of them. It cannot make any of them go first. It can only remove their alibi.
That is why I keep saying the change is individual before it is technological. Tools can do magic, but only if we know the SOP. Each of the five has one move:
Client personnel: fix the ledger-close date in June and treat it as a board commitment.
Audit staff: finish interim work before the non-audit return season, so September is for review.
Board members: ask for the actual filing date against the statutory date, three years running.
Tax officers: surface data mismatches through the year, so reconciliation starts in June instead of September.
The ministry: if an extension is coming, announce it in August; if not, hold the line, as in 2023.
Before 21 October: one test for each seat
If you sign tax audit reports. List every engagement still open today. Beside each, write the date you first received complete books. If most of those dates fall after 15 August, the constraint in your practice is intake, and no extension fixes intake. Put a books-by date in next year’s engagement letter. Then time the one reconciliation that ate the most hours this month; that number is your AI business case.
If you are the CFO or promoter. Ask your auditor for the open Form 3CD clauses, with a named owner beside each. If most names belong to your own staff, the 21 October extension was granted to you. In Indonesia, plan the TY2026 SPT Badan for 30 April 2027 on the assumption that no KEP will follow. In Singapore, name the owner of the 30 November Form C today.
If you sit on the board or audit committee. Table one schedule: statutory due date against actual filing date, last three years, for every return filed in India, Indonesia and Singapore. Then ask a single question: which of these would have been late without an extension? That answer is your real compliance rating.
Yes, that was a lot of numbers. Before the Tamil fraternity invokes our beloved Captain Vijayakanth: he turned statistics into mass entertainment. I am only trying to turn them into a board agenda item
A date everyone keeps
At a Tamil wedding, the muhurtham (the auspicious hour) is never extended. Four hundred plus relatives, three cooks, one priest, and somehow everyone is in the hall by 6:15 in the morning (if its Wednesday or Monday, mostly). Nobody waits for a circular. We already know how to keep a date once we believe it is real.
For those non-tamils, watch the latest NETFLIX “modha rathri” over this long-weekend to understand better joyfully! Well, I know what do you think, but it is NOT what you expect - you can sit along with your teen-kids and watch it. Raja Karuppasamy (casting as ex-lover street kid, is the Director of this movie), and believe it!
The purpose of being a being is to become a better one. The models improve every nine days. We could manage once a year.
Reply and tell me which seat you sit in, and the one step you could move earlier next September. The most useful answers will appear, anonymously, in a future issue.
Lift as you Rise.