Income Tax

Verify the digital signature on your ITR-V / income tax acknowledgement

Updated May 2026 · 5 min read

After you file your income tax return, the portal generates an ITR-V (Verification) acknowledgement. Whether you e-verify via Aadhaar OTP or the department signs the acknowledgement itself, the PDF you download is a signed document. Banks processing a loan, embassies reviewing a visa, and employers checking a payslip trail often ask for it — so knowing how to prove it is genuine is worth five minutes.

First, the password

Many income-tax PDFs are password-protected. The standard ITR-V password is your PAN in lowercase followed by your date of birth in DDMMYYYY format, with no spaces. For example, PAN ABCDE1234F with a birth date of 5 January 1990 gives abcde1234f05011990. You'll need this to open — and to verify — the file.

Verify it online in under a minute

Download the ITR-V from the Income Tax e-filing portal (e-File → Income Tax Returns → View Filed Returns → Download).
Open our signature verifier and upload the PDF.
If a password popup appears, enter the password described above.
Click Verify and read the verdict, the signer name and the signing timestamp.

Understanding the result

A green verdict tells you the acknowledgement hasn't been tampered with and that the signing certificate chains to a trusted Indian root. If you ever receive an ITR-V by email from a preparer and want to be sure nobody altered the figures, this is the definitive check — a single changed digit anywhere in the file breaks the signature and produces a red result.

"Validity unknown" is not a rejection

As with most government PDFs, Adobe Reader may show "validity unknown" simply because it doesn't trust the Indian CCA root out of the box. That is a configuration issue on your device, not a problem with your return. Our tool sidesteps it entirely; if you'd rather fix Adobe permanently, follow our "Signature Not Verified" fix guide.

Keep the signed original

For any submission, always send the original signed PDF, not a print or screenshot. The green-tick copy our tool can generate is a convenient human-readable proof, but the cryptographically signed file is the one that carries legal weight. Learn more about how we verify on our about page.