Got an SMS from the Income-tax Department about high-value transactions: ₹12 lakh credit-card spend and mutual-fund purchases. Is this a notice?

What triggered it: banks and card issuers report credit-card payments of ₹10 lakh or more a year (₹1 lakh if paid in cash), and fund houses report purchases of ₹10 lakh or more, in their statement of financial transactions. The department's system matched those against your return and flagged the file for a self-check.

What to do: log in to the compliance portal through the e-filing site, open e-Campaign, and for each entry choose a response: information is correct, partly correct, relates to another PAN or year, or duplicate. Then open the AIS and give feedback on the same lines there. If your reported income supports the spending and investments (salary, savings, a loan, gifts from relatives), confirm the entries and you are done; no further action follows in most cases.

If the spending genuinely exceeds what your return explains, the safe course is to file an updated return under section 139(8A) (ITR-U) with the missing income and the additional tax, which closes the matter before it becomes a scrutiny.

Keep the bank and card statements for the year; the only follow-up to a confirmed e-Campaign is occasionally a request for them.