Your employer deducted TDS — did it ever reach the IRD? How to check your tax credits

A reader spent ten minutes on the IRD portal last week, first login ever, prompted by the Asar masanta checklist. Twelve payslips for 2082/83, a TDS line on each, roughly Rs 8,400 a month. Annexure 10 showed deposits for eight months. Four months of tax, deducted from her salary, had not reached the government by the time she looked.

Most salaried Nepalis have never run this check. The deduction is automatic, the payslip looks official, and the money is invisible either way. But the TDS line on a payslip is a claim, not a receipt. Whether it became your tax credit depends on a filing your employer makes after payday, and the fiscal year that just closed is exactly the right moment to audit it. The TDS explainer covers what the deduction is; this post is the audit: what should happen, how to see what actually happened, and what to do about each way it goes wrong.

Why the salaried person, of all people, must check

For a single-employer salaried earner, the withholding is not a prepayment toward some later reconciliation. It is the tax. Sections 4(3) and 97 of the Income Tax Act say a resident whose only income is Nepal-source employment from one resident employer has their liability set equal to what the employer withheld under Section 87, and owes no return. No annual filing, which the IRD filing walkthrough covers for everyone else, means no annual moment where a mismatch would surface on its own.

The freelancer reconciles at filing time. The shopkeeper reconciles at filing time. The salaried employee's tax system is the employer's payroll run, unaudited by anyone unless the employee looks. That is the whole case for a once-a-year login.

What is supposed to happen, month by month

Three obligations sit on the employer, all with statutory clocks:

Obligation	Deadline	Where it's written
Withhold tax from salary at Schedule-1 rates	Each payment	Section 87
Deposit the tax + file the e-TDS statement (your PAN, your amount)	Within 25 days of month end	Section 90, as administered per IRD's current FAQ (the unamended text says 15 days)
Give you a withholding certificate for the year	Within 30 days of year end, or of your leaving	Section 91(3)

The e-TDS statement is the link that matters. Since an IRD notice of Bhadra 2078, every deposit filed through e-TDS updates Annexure 10 against the withholdee's PAN automatically; the same notice says short credits get fixed "by contacting the concerned tax office." One more employer-side rule worth knowing: under Section 90(3), tax an employer should have withheld is deemed withheld anyway, so "we forgot to deduct" does not excuse the deposit.

The 25-day clock also sets your audit rhythm. Asar 2083's TDS is due by Shrawan 25, so checking on Shrawan 1 and panicking about a one-month gap is premature. A quarter-sized gap is not.

The check, step by step

1. Have a personal PAN with portal credentials. If you have never registered, the PAN for salaried people post covers it; registration runs through the Taxpayer Portal with an OTP to your mobile or email, and the office issues credentials on verification.
2. Log in at taxpayerportal.ird.gov.np with your PAN credentials.
3. Open the withholdee report for the fiscal year. It currently sits under the portal's verification and withholdee-information menus and feeds the same data as Annexure 10; generate the report for 2082/83. Menu labels have moved before and will move again, so search for "withholdee" or "Annexure 10" rather than memorising a path.
4. Read it line by line. Every entry is a deposit some withholding agent filed against your PAN: employer, bank, broker, tenant. For the salary audit, filter mentally to the employer's name and check two things: that all twelve months appear, and that the amounts match your payslips to the rupee.
5. Keep the printout or PDF. The report doubles as proof of your credits, which is exactly what it exists for.

Bank-interest TDS at 6 percent and dividend TDS at 5 percent will also show up here; those are final withholdings, covered in the refund post, and no action is needed on them.

The three ways it goes wrong, and who owes what

A month or a quarter is missing, amounts otherwise match. The overwhelmingly common case, and the boring one: payroll deposited late or skipped an e-TDS filing. Ask payroll to reconcile; the filing is fixable, and the employer's own incentive is strong since the fee and interest accrue against them. Most cases end here.

Deducted from you, never deposited. The serious case, and the one the reader above found. Your position, per the Act's official English translation: Section 93(2)(a) deems tax actually withheld from a payment to have been paid by the withholdee. The credit is yours because the deduction happened; the failure to remit is the employer's debt, growing at 15 percent a year under Section 119, with a further fee on the unfiled statement under Section 117(3) and, for false statements, penalties of 50 to 100 percent of the shortfall under Section 120. One honesty note: that reading of 93(2)(a) is the single highest-stakes clause in this post, and while the translation's text is clear, a dispute is the wrong place to discover a nuance — have a tax professional confirm it against the current Nepali text before you stake a large sum on it.

Never withheld at all. The trap case. Where tax was not deducted from a taxable payment, Section 90(5) makes employer and employee jointly and severally liable, and Section 90(7) lets an employer who later pays recover it from you. A payslip with no TDS line on taxable pay is not a bonus; it is a liability quietly accruing in your name. Raise it in writing.

The escalation ladder

Payroll first, in writing, with your payslips and the portal report attached; most gaps resolve as a missed filing. If payroll stalls, the concerned Inland Revenue Office is the body IRD's own notice points short-credit cases to, and IRD's service channels (serviceird@ird.gov.np, 01-5970081 on current pages) take complaints. If the IRD itself denies a credit you can document, Section 115 gives you an administrative-review application within 30 days of the decision.

One myth to clear out, because several Nepali tax pages carry it: the "Rs 100 per day, maximum Rs 5,000" late fee for e-TDS is India's rule (Section 234E of the Indian Act), not Nepal's. Nepal's employer-side numbers are percentage-based, and no research source produced a per-day fee. If a page quotes that figure, treat its whole penalty table as suspect. It is the same cross-border contamination as the no-PAN "higher TDS rate" myth the TDS explainer debunks.

What you actually need to know

• Payslip TDS is a claim; Annexure 10 is the receipt. The employer has 25 days from month end to deposit and file against your PAN, and the portal shows exactly what arrived. Log in once a year, each Shrawan, and compare.
• If it was deducted, the deposit risk is the employer's. Section 93(2)(a)'s deemed-paid rule and the 15 percent Section 119 interest both point at them; confirm the clause with a professional before a big dispute, but do not accept "the company will sort it" without the portal showing it sorted.
• If it was never deducted, the risk is shared. Joint liability under Section 90(5) means a missing TDS line on taxable salary is your problem now, not at some future audit. Ask in writing.

Found a gap between your payslips and your Annexure 10 and unsure which failure mode you are looking at? Email parjanya57@gmail.com with the two numbers and I will help you read it.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the earn-and-reconcile section.