You have ended up with two PANs. Here is how to give one up

The bar is explicit. Section 139A(7) says that a person who has already been allotted a permanent account number "shall not apply, obtain or possess another" one. The Income-tax Act 2025 carries the same rule forward at Section 262(8).

The practical damage usually arrives before any penalty does. Your TDS credits split across two numbers, so the tax deducted on your NRO interest sits against a PAN your return never mentions and the credit simply does not appear. Refunds stall. Your AIS and Form 26AS each tell half the story. A bank or a registrar asks for KYC and gets a mismatch. None of that resolves itself, and each year you leave it adds another set of records to reconcile later.

Until recently the answer was to fill in the PAN change or correction form and list the unwanted PANs in the item provided for it. That item existed, it was headed "Mention other Permanent Account Numbers (PANs) inadvertently allotted to you", and it is what almost every article still tells you to use.

It is no longer the prescribed form. With effect from 1 April 2026, an order of the Director General of Income-tax (Systems), issued under Rule 158(12) of the Income-tax Rules 2026 read with Section 262(4) of the Income-tax Act 2025, prescribes two forms and only two: PAN CR-01 for an individual and PAN CR-02 for everyone else.

We read PAN CR-01. It has ten numbered items, covering name, gender, date of birth, address, passport number, foreign tax identification number, contact details, parents' names, and the documents you are attaching. There is no field for a duplicate PAN anywhere on it.

So if you follow the instructions you find elsewhere, you will reach the form and find nothing to fill in.

The Department's own position is the one to follow. Its PAN 2.0 FAQ puts the obligation on you and names the office: a person holding more than one PAN "is obliged to bring it to notice of Jurisdictional Assessing officer and get the additional PAN deleted/de-activated".

So the request goes to your Jurisdictional Assessing Officer, in writing. It should identify both PANs, say plainly which one you use and which should be deactivated, and enclose copies of both cards along with proof of identity. If you are abroad, this is correspondence rather than a counter visit, and it can be run by someone acting for you in India.

Your jurisdiction is shown on the income-tax portal under your profile, and it can be reached through the portal's grievance facility as well as by post. If you do not know which officer holds your file, that is the first thing to establish, because a letter to the wrong ward simply sits there.

You will be told to keep the older one. There is no rule that says so, in the Act, in the Rules, or in any departmental instruction we could find.

What the official instructions actually key on is use. The Department's own correction instructions say the PAN to be cancelled must not be the one "currently used" and that the one currently used goes at the top of the form. So the test is which number your filing history, your TDS credits and your bank and demat records are actually attached to.

Usually that is the older PAN, which is why the shorthand survives. Not always. If you left India, stopped filing on the first PAN for a decade, and everything since has run on the second, keeping the first because it is older gives you the harder migration and no benefit. Work out where the history sits before you decide, because reversing this choice afterwards is far more work than making it correctly.

Section 272B is where the 10,000 rupee figure comes from. Three things about it are usually left out.

It is discretionary. The section says the Assessing Officer "may direct" that the person pay the penalty, not that they shall.

You are entitled to be heard. No penalty order can be passed unless you have been given an opportunity of being heard on it.

And there is a statutory defence. Section 273B names Section 272B expressly and provides that no penalty shall be imposable if you prove there was reasonable cause for the failure. A second PAN issued by an employer without your knowledge, or an application you believed had lapsed, is the kind of fact that goes to reasonable cause.

Under the Income-tax Act 2025 the penalty provision is renumbered, and the amount is reported as unchanged. Voluntarily coming forward is not what creates the exposure. Holding two PANs is.

If one of your PANs has gone inoperative, that is a separate problem riding alongside this one, and it bites harder.

An inoperative PAN means refunds are not issued, no interest is paid on them for that period, and tax is deducted at the higher rate under Section 206AA, which generally works out at 20 percent. That is the rate people run into on NRO interest and on a property sale.

The relief is that a non-resident is not required to link PAN with Aadhaar at all. The exempt categories published by the Department cover a non-resident under the Act and a person who is not a citizen of India. Where a PAN has gone inoperative anyway, it is usually because the Department's record still shows you as resident, and the fix is to tell your Assessing Officer your residential status and evidence it, which is the same correspondence as the duplicate-PAN request and can go in the same letter.

One thing that catches people: an inoperative PAN is not a dead PAN. You can still file a return on it.