The case against me is a hard disk, a Tally backup and a WhatsApp dump taken off my phone in the search. What are the rules?
There is a specific power to make you open the system — s.132(1)(iib) requires a person in possession of books maintained in electronic form to afford the authorised officer the facility to inspect them, and failing to do so is an offence under s.275B carrying rigorous imprisonment of up to two years and a fine. What there is not is a settled rule on proof. Certification was a condition precedent to admissibility in a court under s.65B of the Indian Evidence Act 1872, and is under s.63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, which replaced that Act from 1 July 2024; but the Tribunal is divided on whether the law of evidence binds income-tax authorities at all, and no decision was located on chain of custody, hash values, mirror imaging or data held in the cloud.
The power first. Section 132(1)(iib) allows the authorised officer to "require any person who is found to be in possession or control of any books of account or other documents maintained in the form of electronic record as defined in clause (t) of sub-section (1) of section 2 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (21 of 2000), to afford the authorised officer the necessary facility to inspect such books of account or other documents". That is the provision under which the search party asks for the laptop to be unlocked and the accounting software to be opened. The department's own guidance page on prosecutions records that a person who fails to provide that facility "shall be punishable with simple imprisonment for a term of up to 6 months, or with fine or with both". That page is wrong, and it is worth knowing before you advise anyone to refuse. The offence is in s.275B, which the department's own bare-Act page prints in these terms: "If a person who is required to afford the authorised officer the necessary facility to inspect the books of account or other documents, as required under clause (iib) of sub-section (1) of section 132, fails to afford such facility to the authorised officer, he shall be punishable with rigorous imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years and shall also be liable to fine." Rigorous, up to two years, and the fine is in addition rather than an alternative — four times the term the guidance page gives.
Notice what the clause covers and what it does not. It is a facility-to-inspect power over books of account or other documents maintained in electronic form. Nothing on the pages fetched for this entry gives an express power to compel a password as such, to compel decryption, or to reach data hosted on a server outside India through an account accessed from a device at the premises. In practice a search party will ask for logins to cloud-hosted accounting and email, and the person searched has to decide whether that is within the clause. No decision on that question was located in the research for this entry, and none is named here.
On proof, the starting point is the law of evidence. Section 65B(4) of the Indian Evidence Act 1872 required a certificate identifying the electronic record, describing the manner in which it was produced and giving the particulars of the device; s.63(4) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, which replaced it, requires the same and more — see the last paragraph of this page. The Supreme Court held in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, 2020 SCC Online SC 571, that such a certificate is mandatory and a condition precedent to the admissibility of evidence by way of electronic record, following Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, AIR 2015 SC 180; the certificate is not needed where the original storage device itself is produced. Those citations are taken from a practitioner article on itatonline.org, not from the judgments.
The difficulty in tax is the prior question: does the Evidence Act apply to an Assessing Officer or to the Tribunal at all? The Tribunal has gone both ways on it, and the corpus should not pretend otherwise. On one side, a Delhi bench in Purushttam Lal Soni v. ACIT, ITA Nos. 3509 to 3515/Del/2025, decided on 17 December 2025, is reported to have held that the rigours of the Evidence Act do not apply to income-tax proceedings and that a s.65B certificate is not strictly mandatory where authenticity is otherwise established; that report was found on a single site and is not corroborated here. On the other, a Delhi bench in Ritu Tuli v. DCIT for assessment year 2017-18 is reported to have deleted a s.69B addition built on a photograph recovered from a third party's mobile phone, on the footing that a s.65B certificate is mandatory and the document was in any event unsigned, undated and not clearly readable; that report too was found on a single site. Between the two sits the older and safer proposition, from Chuharmal v. CIT [1988] 172 ITR 250, that although the income-tax authorities are not strictly bound by the rigours of technical rules of evidence, they are not precluded from invoking the principles contained in the Evidence Act whenever the occasion demands.
What is corroborated is how the objection usually ends. In Garware Technical Fibres Ltd v. DCIT, decided by the Pune Bench on 9 January 2025 and held in the corpus at garware-technical-fibres-v-dcit-65b-certificate-pen-drive, the assessee's point that no s.65B(4) certificate had been drawn at the time of the search failed because the CIT(A) called for a remand report, the Assessing Officer produced a certificate for the seized pen drive, the copy was given to the assessee for comments, and the assessee made none. The lesson is procedural: the objection is not self-executing and it is not spent when the certificate arrives — it has to be pressed against the certificate itself.
On what the corpus cannot yet tell you: no Indian direct-tax decision was located dealing with the chain of custody of a seized device, with the taking of a forensic mirror image and the recording of hash values, with the difference between the seized medium and the working copy the officer actually reads, or with data held on a cloud service rather than on the device. Section 292C raises a presumption about books of account, documents and assets found in a person's possession in a search, and "document" is generally taken to include an electronic record, but no page fetched here confirms how that presumption is applied to a file copied off a server. On the governing statute: the Indian Evidence Act 1872 was repealed by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023, which came into force on 1 July 2024, and the successor to s.65B is s.63 of that Act. Section 63(4) still requires a certificate identifying the record, describing the manner of its production and giving the particulars of the devices, and the commentary fetched for this entry records one change that matters in practice: the certificate now has to be signed both by the person in charge of the computer and by an expert, where s.65B(4) required only the responsible person. So for material seized on or after 1 July 2024 the objection is a s.63 objection, and Arjun Panditrao and Anvar P.V. were decided on the old section. The text of s.63 was read here only in commentary and not in the bare Act. Treat all of this as open, and plead the underlying facts — who copied what, from which device, when, and whether the copy is complete — rather than relying on a label.
Electronic material is now the usual backbone of a search assessment: Tally backups, Excel sheets on a pen drive, chat exports, images on a third party's phone. The objection practitioners reach for is the missing s.65B certificate, and on the reported outcomes that objection is unreliable — it is met either by producing a certificate at the remand stage or by holding that the Evidence Act does not bind the tax authorities. What does work is the factual attack: legibility, authorship, completeness of the copy, whose device it was, and whether the entries are corroborated. Building the file that way keeps you in the same territory as the loose-sheet cases the corpus already covers.
I paid advance tax for the year but had not filed my return when the search took place. Can the department still call that income undisclosed?
The Commissioner refused to waive the interest on my demand because I own property worth crores. Is owning assets an answer to genuine hardship?
When must the satisfaction note be recorded before proceedings are taken against a third party?
A search was made on someone else and my papers were found. From which date are my six years counted - the search, or when my Assessing Officer got the papers?
The company and I have a mutual, open and current account with money moving both ways. Is the deemed dividend the closing debit balance, the highest debit balance during the year, or something else? And can the Department tax money that reached me through a firm rather than directly?
The seized documents say nothing about the years being assessed. Can s.153C still be used for them?
Customs seized my cash and was ordered to return it. Can the income-tax department issue a search warrant and take it from customs instead?
The police seized cash from our employee and the Commissioner issued a section 132A warrant because he had no papers for it — is that authorisation valid?
Every page in this library links to what it was written from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
