My old s.148 notice was turned into a show-cause notice by Ashish Agarwal and a fresh s.148 notice came in 2022. How do I work out whether that fresh notice was in time?
You count days. The Taxation and Other Laws (Relaxation and Amendment of Certain Provisions) Act 2020 did not give the department a fresh limitation period; it froze the one that was about to run out and pushed its expiry to 30 June 2021 through three notifications. In Union of India v Rajeev Bansal the Supreme Court held that a notice issued under the old s.148 between 1 April and 30 June 2021 stands as a s.148A(b) show-cause notice from the date it was issued, that the days left between that date and 30 June 2021 are all the department ever had, and that those days are frozen from then until the officer supplied you the information and material after Ashish Agarwal, plus the two weeks to reply. Add the surviving days to the end of that exclusion and you have the last date for the s.148A(d) order and the fresh s.148 notice. A notice issued after that date is without jurisdiction, and the High Courts have been quashing them.
Start with what TOLA actually says. Section 3(1) of the Taxation and Other Laws (Relaxation and Amendment of Certain Provisions) Act 2020, Act No. 38 of 2020, which received assent on 29 September 2020, applies where a time limit specified in, prescribed or notified under a specified Act falls during the period from 20 March 2020 to 31 December 2020, "or such other date after the 31st day of December, 2020, as the Central Government may, by notification, specify in this behalf", for the completion or compliance of an action listed in clause (a) or clause (b). Clause (a) covers "completion of any proceeding or passing of any order or issuance of any notice, intimation, notification, sanction or approval, or such other action, by whatever name called, by any authority". Where it applies, the time limit "shall, notwithstanding anything contained in the specified Act, stand extended to the 31st day of March, 2021, or such other date after the 31st day of March, 2021, as the Central Government may, by notification, specify". The Income-tax Act 1961 is a specified Act.
Now read what it does not do. It does not create a limitation period. It only relaxes one, and only one that was already about to expire inside the window. If your year's limitation had already run out before 20 March 2020, TOLA does nothing for it. If it was going to run out after the window closed, TOLA does nothing for it either. And the relaxation is only of the time limit. Conclusion (c) in Rajeev Bansal is that s.3(1) of TOLA "overrides Section 149 of the Income Tax Act only to the extent of relaxing the time limit for issuance of a reassessment notice under Section 148". So TOLA moves the date on which an existing three-year or six-year period expires, and does nothing else to s.149. It does extend the time available to the specified authority to grant the sanction under s.151, because that is a time limit too. Conclusions (d) and (e) give the two tests, and they give different dates. For s.151 of the new regime: "if the time limit of three years from the end of an assessment year falls between 20 March 2020 and 31 March 2021, then the specified authority under Section 151(i) has extended time till 30 June 2021 to grant approval". For s.151 of the old regime: "if the time limit of four years from the end of an assessment year falls between 20 March 2020 and 31 March 2021, then the specified authority under Section 151(2) has extended time till 31 March 2021 to grant approval". The extended time for the old-regime authority therefore runs out on 31 March 2021, not on 30 June 2021, and the two dates should never be run together.
Three notifications moved the dates, and every computation runs through them. Notification No. 93/2020, F. No. 370142/35/2020-TPL, S.O. 4805(E), dated 31 December 2020, superseded the earlier Notification No. 88/2020, S.O. 3906(E), dated 29 October 2020, and specified 30 March 2021 as the end of the period during which the time limit falls and 31 March 2021 as the date to which it stands extended. Notification No. 20/2021, same file number, S.O. 1432(E), dated 31 March 2021, amended that notification and, for orders under s.144C(13), notices under s.148 where the time limit is governed by s.149, and sanctions under s.151, moved the end of the falling period from 30 March to 31 March 2021 and took the extended date to 30 April 2021. A fourth, Notification No. 10/2021 dated 27 February 2021, also modified 93/2020; I could not reach it, and it is named here only because the next notification recites it. Notification No. 38/2021, same file number, S.O. 1703(E), dated 27 April 2021, took the same set of actions, together with assessment and reassessment orders under ss.153 and 153B, from 30 April 2021 to 30 June 2021. That is where the chain stops, and that is why 30 June 2021 is the date every Rajeev Bansal computation is built on.
Two of those notifications carried an Explanation saying that for issuing the notice and granting the sanction, ss.148, 149 and 151 "as they stood as on the 31st day of March 2021, before the commencement of the Finance Act, 2021" would apply. That Explanation is what produced the whole dispute, because the Finance Act 2021 had already substituted ss.147 to 151 with effect from 1 April 2021 and the department went on issuing notices under the old provisions until 30 June 2021. The Delhi High Court in Mon Mohan Kohli held that a notification under s.3(1) can extend a time limit and nothing more, and cannot keep a repealed procedure alive. The Supreme Court agreed with the High Courts on that in Ashish Agarwal, but instead of letting roughly ninety thousand notices fall it used Article 142 to deem each of them a show-cause notice under s.148A(b), directed officers to supply the information and material within thirty days and gave assessees two weeks to reply.
Step one of the computation is your own assessment year's outer date. Work out, for your year, the date the relevant limitation expired, and ask whether that date fell between 20 March 2020 and 31 March 2021. If it did, the outer date becomes 30 June 2021. There is no more to it than four subtractions. For assessment year 2013-14 the old six-year limit expired on 31 March 2020 and TOLA moves it to 30 June 2021. For 2014-15 the six-year limit expired on 31 March 2021 and again moves to 30 June 2021. For 2016-17 the new three-year limit expired on 31 March 2020 and moves to 30 June 2021. For 2017-18 the three-year limit expired on 31 March 2021 and moves to 30 June 2021. For 2015-16 neither limit fell inside the window — three years ran out on 31 March 2019 and six years on 31 March 2022 — so TOLA gives the department nothing at all, which is why the Bombay High Court in Hexaware held TOLA did not apply to that year. You will see these five years set out as a table in Rajeev Bansal at paragraph 19(e). Do not cite it as the Court's. It sits under the heading of submissions and it is the Revenue's tabulation, advanced for the proposition that all five years were within limitation — which is a proposition the Court did not accept for 2015-16.
Step two is the days left when the original notice went out. The old s.148 notice is deemed to be a s.148A(b) show-cause notice from the date it was actually issued, not from 2022, so the clock stops on that date. Count from that date to 30 June 2021. That number is the whole of the time the officer had left, and it is the number the rest of the computation turns on. The Supreme Court worked an illustration at paragraph 112: for a notice issued on 1 May 2021 the officer has "sixty-one days [days between 1 May 2021 and 30 June 2021]". Note the convention — the Court counted 1 May itself. The Delhi High Court, computing a notice issued on 1 June 2021, said it was issued twenty-nine days before the expiry, which does not count the day of issue. The two methods differ by one day, and where the surviving period is two or three days that one day decides the case, so run both figures.
Step three is the exclusion, and you have to find the right proviso for your dates. The rule came in with the substitution of s.149 by the Finance Act 2021 with effect from 1 April 2021, where it was the third proviso to s.149(1); the Finance Act 2023 inserted two further provisos ahead of it from 1 April 2023, which made it the fifth; and it went altogether when s.149 was substituted again with effect from 1 September 2024, which left s.149(1) with no provisos at all. For a notice of 2021 or 2022 it is the third proviso, and it excludes from the computation of limitation the time or extended time allowed to the assessee under a show-cause notice issued under s.148A(b) and the period during which proceedings under s.148A are stayed by an order or injunction of any court. The Supreme Court held that the Article 142 direction in Ashish Agarwal is such an order, and that what comes out of the computation is "the time during which the show cause notices were deemed to be stayed ... from the date of issuance of the deemed notice between 1 April 2021 and 30 June 2021 till the supply of relevant information and material by the assessing officers to the assesses in terms of the directions issued by this Court in Ashish Agarwal (supra), and the period of two weeks allowed to the assesses to respond". So 4 May 2022, the date of Ashish Agarwal, is not where the exclusion stops. It is only the date from which the officer's thirty days to supply the material began. The exclusion runs on to the date he actually supplied it and through the two weeks you had to answer.
Then add the surviving days to the end of the exclusion. Take assessment year 2013-14 and the facts the Delhi High Court worked through in Ram Balram Buildhome. The old six-year limit for that year expired on 31 March 2020, which is inside the window, so the outer date is 30 June 2021. The old s.148 notice went out on 1 June 2021, leaving twenty-nine days. That notice became a s.148A(b) show-cause notice with effect from 1 June 2021, and the clock stopped there. Ashish Agarwal was decided on 4 May 2022; the officer supplied the information and material on 30 May 2022; the company replied on 13 June 2022. Everything from 1 June 2021 to 13 June 2022 comes out. The twenty-nine days then run afresh from 13 June 2022: seventeen of them take you to 30 June 2022 and the remaining twelve to 12 July 2022. Seventeen plus twelve is twenty-nine, and 12 July 2022 was the last date for the s.148A(d) order and the fresh s.148 notice. The notice was issued on 30 July 2022, eighteen days late, and it went.
Check the seven-day floor before you rely on a very short surviving period. It sits in the proviso immediately after the exclusion — the fourth proviso to s.149(1) for a 2021 or 2022 notice, the sixth from 1 April 2023, and gone after 1 September 2024. Where, immediately after that exclusion, the limitation left to the officer for passing an order under s.148A(d) is less than seven days, the proviso extends it to seven days and the s.149 limit is deemed to be extended accordingly. In the example above twenty-nine days were left, so it changed nothing. For a notice issued on 29 June 2021 the surviving period is one or two days, and the proviso hands the officer seven. Those words read "is less than seven days" when these notices were issued; the Finance Act 2023 substituted "does not exceed seven days" with effect from 1 April 2023, which is after the dates that matter here, so use the earlier form for a 2022 notice. Also check s.151 separately: TOLA extends the time for the sanction, but it does not change who had to give it, and that is a distinct ground.
The High Courts have not split on the method. The Delhi High Court applied it in Ram Balram Buildhome on 30 January 2025 and rejected the department's argument that the officer had a free month from the date of your reply, holding that the s.148A procedure had itself to be completed inside the period available for issuing the s.148 notice. The Bombay High Court applied the same method in Hitesh Ramniklal Shah on 11 November 2025 for assessment year 2014-15, where the original notice of 29 June 2021 left almost nothing, and quashed a s.148 notice of 27 July 2022; that Bench recorded agreement with decisions of the Delhi, Gujarat and Bombay High Courts on the point. The Tribunals are doing the same arithmetic. Where the divergence has appeared is elsewhere: on the day-count convention described above, and on how far Rajeev Bansal carries on sanction, where the Delhi High Court in Rohit Kumar held on 15 January 2025 that the judgment merely alluded to the s.151 time frames and does not validate an approval given by a Joint Commissioner after the Finance Act 2021 took that power away.
This is a jurisdictional point and it is arithmetic, not advocacy. If the fresh s.148 notice went out after the surviving period, the notice, the s.148A(d) order and the whole reassessment fall, and no amount of material on the merits saves them. It also cannot be cured by your having taken part in the proceedings. The department fought Rajeev Bansal and won on TOLA, but the Court kept every defence under s.149 open, so the case you actually have is the one it left you: your own year, your own dates, your own day count. Conclusion (h) is the sentence to have in front of you: "The assessing officers were required to issue the reassessment notice under Section 148 of the new regime within the time limit surviving under the Income Tax Act read with TOLA. All notices issued beyond the surviving period are time barred and liable to be set aside."
The only thing behind my reopening notice is the Valuation Officer's report. Is that enough?
My return was only processed under 143(1). Does that stop the department reopening it later?
The order under section 148A(d) rejects everything I said and the section 148 notice has followed. Can I take it straight to the High Court?
I made unexplained investments after the close of my accounting year. Which year can the officer tax them in, and can he reopen an earlier year to do it?
My land was notified and an award was made under the Land Acquisition Act, but I thought the award was too low, negotiated a higher figure and executed a sale deed. The Assessing Officer now says that was a voluntary sale and denies s.10(37). Is he right?
How much am I actually required to disclose — and can they reopen because the officer drew the wrong conclusion?
The sanctioning authority just wrote 'yes' and signed. Is that a sanction?
A reassessment was done in between. Does the two-year clock for s.263 restart from it?
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