The Inland Revenue Department has again urged taxpayers to submit income tax returns for the 2025/2026 year of assessment on or before 30 November, with about 1.2 million registered individual taxpayers covered by the deadline.
The department repeated the call on Wednesday afternoon, directing taxpayers to its hotline on 1944 and its website at ird.gov.lk, and framing the appeal under its campaign line “Taxes for a Better Future,” the Daily Mirror reported at 2.53 p.m.
The part most people get wrong
The single most consequential detail is not the date. It is who has to file.
EconomyNext reported on Monday that every registered individual must submit a return for 2025/2026 — including:
- those with no taxable income for the year, and
- those whose tax has already been deducted at source, through PAYE, Advance Personal Income Tax (APIT) or withholding tax on bank interest.
Registration, not liability, is what triggers the obligation. A salaried employee whose employer has already remitted every rupee owed is still required to file, and so is a registered person who earned nothing at all. This is the point on which compliance most commonly fails, because both groups have a reasonable intuition that there is nothing to declare.
How to file
Returns go through the department’s RAMIS portal at ird.gov.lk. Taxpayers log in with a password, or with a one-time password sent to the email address or postal address held on their registration record.
That last condition is a practical trap: if the contact details the department holds are out of date, the OTP goes somewhere the taxpayer cannot reach. EconomyNext reports that taxpayers needing to update those details must send a written request with a copy of their National Identity Card to [email protected] — a step that takes time and should not be left to late November.
Support is available on the 1944 call centre, and through advisory desks at the IRD head office and regional branches. The appeal was attributed to Deputy Commissioner General J. M. S. S. Rathnawardana and Commissioner Nandana Kumara.
What happens if you miss it
Failure to file empowers the Commissioner General to impose financial penalties, issue an estimated assessment, or begin legal proceedings.
The middle power is the one worth understanding. An estimated assessment means the department calculates the liability itself, on its own figures, in the absence of a return — and the burden then falls on the taxpayer to displace that number rather than on the department to prove it.
This is a reminder, not a new announcement
Readers encountering this story for the first time this week should know that the deadline is not new and nothing about it has changed.
This desk reported the 30 November date in June, when the IRD opened the filing window for the 2025/26 assessment year and warned then that legal action would follow non-submission. The deadline has stood since.
The Daily Mirror has itself now filed the same reminder twice: once on 14 October at 8.09 p.m. under the headline “IRD urges taxpayers to submit returns by November 30” (108-352523), and again on 21 October under an almost identical headline. The two filings carry the same deadline and the same assessment year. The October coverage is a compliance campaign intensifying as the date approaches, not a fresh decision — and roughly six weeks remain.
A second IRD announcement the same day — on enforcement
Separately and unrelated to the filing deadline, the department signed an agreement on Wednesday evening that widens how tax evasion can be prosecuted.
The Inland Revenue Department and the Excise Department have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at preventing money laundering and tax evasion, Hiru News reported at 9.32 p.m. Its stated purpose is to exchange intelligence between the two departments through a joint decision-making mechanism and to conduct parallel investigations on the basis of what is shared.
Hiru sets out the legal change behind it. Under the Prevention of Money Laundering (Amendment) Act No. 16 of 2026, with effect from 4 August 2026, tax evasion offences under section 189 of the Inland Revenue Act and offences falling under the Excise Ordinance became predicate “unlawful activity” offences for money laundering — part of strengthening Sri Lanka’s legal framework against money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.
That reclassification is the substance. Tax evasion prosecuted as a revenue offence and tax evasion prosecuted as a predicate offence for money laundering are different exposures, carrying different investigative powers and different asset consequences. The memorandum builds the information-sharing machinery to use the change.
The two announcements are presented together here because they came from the same department on the same day and both concern compliance. They are not connected to each other, and no filing links them: one is a filing deadline for individual taxpayers, the other an inter-agency enforcement agreement.
Not reported
No filing gives the number of returns received so far for 2025/2026, so the share of the 1.2 million still outstanding is unknown — the figure that would show whether the campaign is working. None states the penalty amounts, the basis on which an estimated assessment is calculated, or whether any extension is contemplated.
On the memorandum, Hiru does not say who signed it for either department, whether it has a duration or review date, or how many cases either department expects it to generate. No verified newsroom other than Hiru had filed on the memorandum at the time of writing, and it is cited here for that announcement alone.