How to Find PAN Number of a Person or Firm or Company

Most often, we as Accountants have to get the works done even though we have short of information. 

One of such situations is: We don't have a Permanent Account Number (PAN) but we have to manage the things  like

• We don't have PAN of a Person or a Partnership Firm or a Company who is a TDS deductee but we have to file a Quarterly e-TDS Return;
• We have file a IT Return of our Company where we don't have PAN of a person who gave Unsecured Loan which covered under Section 269SS/ 269T; 
• Knowing PAN of Auditor/ Audit Firm for RoC or IT Forms
• Filing PAN of a Partner or Director of Key Management Personnel or Major Shareholder in IT Return Form, etc

The following are some of techniques that we use in our day-to-day practice for finding the PAN of an Individual, a Partnership Firm, a Company, a trust or a Government Organization:

1. Through Know your TAN (Not Know your PAN)

I as a Chartered Accountant always feel quite easy to know PAN of a person through Know your TAN by providing Category, State and Name. We don't need to give full name. It's biggest advantage here. 

Here, the tricky is choosing Category. Most of the cases, we can guess the category correctly but sometimes, we have to play around by changing the categories.

There are cases, especially in case of Govt Organization, we may not find PAN in TAN Database or the PAN what we are looking for does not have TAN at all. In such cases, we have to go to the following alternatives.

2. Know your PAN

Following link Know your PAN and submitting the form after filling DoB and Surname

If you don't know Date of Incorporation of a Company, you may follow link Company Master Details of MCA21 Site and the result will be as follows:

Finding PAN of a Company is quite simple. Getting Date of Incorporation from Master Data of MCA21 Site and submitting Know your PAN of IT Site.

However, you may find sometime name of the company in MCA21 is different from name of the Assessee in IT database.  In such situations, we need to play around a little bit.

For example, PRIVATE LIMITED in MCA21 but PVT LTD in IT Database, There is space between two words in company name as per MCA21 but there is no space as per IT Database, etc. 

3. Through Service Tax Invoice:

It's quite simple one.

If we go through the provisions of the Service Tax, every service provider who issues Tax Invoice has to give his Service Tax Registration Number on the Invoice mandatorily; and 

The service tax registration number is a 15 digit number which comprises as follows:

1st 10 digits: PAN No. of the Assessee

11th & 12th digits: Service Tax Code (it's either ST or SD)

13th, 14th & 15th digits: Serial Number for the ST Registration allotted for a PAN Card

4. Through RoC Forms:

As a Chartered Accountant, I always find new way for a problem. This is the most interesting and challenging option of finding PAN Number.

We must admit the fact that most of the businessmen are Directors of one or more companies and has the DIN. Now-a-days, it's very easy to know the DIN of a director. You can find DIN in RoC Forms and Income Tax Forms also.

To know DIN of a person, follow View Signatory Details of MCA21 site.

Here is the tricky now. We can get PAN number of a director from many RoC Forms but I go now with downloading Form No. INC-1 and fill some of the basic fields of the form, fill the DIN in Point No. 8 (Particulars of Proposed Directors) and click Pre-fill. That's it, we get the PAN Number corresponding to the DIN from the MCA21 Database as shown in the screen shot below.

As an Accountant, the above are some of the techniques that I use in our day-to-day practice for finding the PAN. If you know any new technique or do you have any query on finding PAN, please provide as a comment below for the benefit our Accountants Community.