Section 147A says that for sections 148 and 148A the Assessing Officer “shall mean and shall always be deemed to have meant to be an Assessing Officer other than the National Faceless Assessment Centre or any assessment unit referred to in sub-section (3) of section 144B”, notwithstanding anything in any judgment, order or decree of any court, in section 151A, or in any scheme framed under section 151A. It was inserted after section 147 by section 9 of the Finance Act, 2026 (No. 4 of 2026), assented to on 30 March 2026, and is deemed inserted with effect from 1 April 2021. On 10 April 2026 the Supreme Court set aside the High Court judgments that had held the jurisdictional officer's notice bad, and remitted them so that section 147A itself could be challenged. On 10 September 2026 the Punjab and Haryana High Court decided that challenge in Jyoti Sareen v. Union of India and struck section 147A down. On 18 September 2026 the Supreme Court granted leave and stayed that judgment in Union of India v. Bharat Industrial Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., on the condition that assessment and reassessment proceedings do not proceed further until the main matter is finally disposed of, and fixed final hearing for 3 December 2026. So section 147A operates today because the only judgment against it is stayed, and the date that governs your planning is 3 December 2026.
The dispute began with the Scheme notified under s.151A on 29 March 2022. One line of High Court authority read it as requiring reassessment notices to issue through the faceless mechanism, so that a notice from the jurisdictional Assessing Officer was without jurisdiction — the Bombay High Court in Hexaware Technologies (Writ Petition No. 1778 of 2023, 3 May 2024, K.R. Shriram and Dr Neela Gokhale JJ) is the entry in this library on that side, and it rejected concurrent jurisdiction in terms. The other read the faceless architecture as operating alongside the jurisdictional officer, on the footing that s.144B is procedural and is not the source of the power to reassess — the Delhi High Court in T.K.S. Builders (W.P.(C) 1968/2023, 28 October 2024, Yashwant Varma and Ravinder Dudeja JJ) is the entry on that side, and it confined itself to that single question, reserving the petitioners' other objections to the reopening for separate proceedings. Both entries remain in the library, and both must now be read with what follows. Both have also since been overtaken on their own facts: on remand from the Supreme Court the Bombay High Court re-decided Hexaware on 3 July 2026 and Hitesh Ramniklal Shah on 15 June 2026, in each case setting the s.148 notice aside as time-barred for assessment year 2015-16 without reaching s.147A at all.
Here is section 147A as Parliament enacted it. Its marginal note is “Assessing Officer for purposes of sections 148 and 148A”, it was inserted after section 147 by section 9 of the Finance Act, 2026 (No. 4 of 2026), which received assent on 30 March 2026, and it is deemed to have been inserted with effect from 1 April 2021. It has no sub-sections. It reads: “Notwithstanding anything contained in any judgment, order or decree of any court or in section 151A or in any scheme framed thereunder, for the removal of doubts, it is hereby clarified that the Assessing Officer for the purposes of sections 148 and 148A shall mean and shall always be deemed to have meant to be an Assessing Officer other than the National Faceless Assessment Centre or any assessment unit referred to in sub-section (3) of section 144B.” The departmental page for the section carries the footnote “Ins. by Act No. 4 of 2026, w.r.e.f. 1-4-2021”, and section 9 of the enacted Act sets the section out in exactly those words.
Four things in the enacted words are worth holding on to, because summaries of the section drop them. The notwithstanding clause reaches a “judgment, order or decree” of any court, not merely a judgment or order. The exclusion is disjunctive — an Assessing Officer other than the National Faceless Assessment Centre “or” any section 144B(3) assessment unit — so the officer has to be outside both, and a unit inside the faceless machinery cannot issue the notice even if it is not the Centre itself. The excluded category is defined by reference to section 144B(3), which is where the assessment units are constituted, so the section does not disturb what section 144B does at the assessment stage; it speaks only to who may issue the notice under sections 148 and 148A. And the operative formula is “for the removal of doubts, it is hereby clarified”. That declaratory framing is the whole ground on which the retrospective date is defended — the argument being that the section only says what the law always meant — and it is the ground on which it is attacked, the answer being that several High Courts had held the opposite and a clarification cannot undo a decided case.
On 10 April 2026 the Supreme Court decided the batch: Income Tax Officer, Ward 2(1), Chandigarh v. Tej Partap Singh, Civil Appeal No. 4716 of 2026 and connected appeals, Surya Kant CJ, B.V. Nagarathna and Joymalya Bagchi JJ. It set aside the High Court judgments that had quashed jurisdictional-officer notices, and set them aside expressly “on this limited ground” — that the foundation of those judgments had been altered by the amending legislation. The assessees were given liberty to amend their petitions to challenge s.147A “within a period of four (4) weeks from the date of uploading of this order”. Read that twice: the four weeks ran from the date of uploading, 29 April 2026, not from 10 April. The Revenue got three weeks after that. There was to be “an interim stay of further assessment/reassessment proceedings pursuant to the impugned notices” — but that stay is “subject to such terms and conditions as may be imposed by the High Courts”, so it is not self-executing and you need to know what your High Court attached to it. The High Courts were asked to decide preferably by 30 September 2026. The Court recorded that it had “not expressed any opinion on the merits of the controversy, including the validity, scope, effect, retrospectivity or applicability of the amended provisions”. It disposed of connected batches in the same terms, including ACIT v. Rudra Alloys (P) Ltd. on 19 June 2026.
Then a court ruled. On 10 September 2026 the Punjab and Haryana High Court decided the amended challenge in Jyoti Sareen v. Union of India, CWP No. 15791 of 2024 (O&M), the lead of several hundred connected petitions, reserved 8 September and pronounced 10 September 2026, Deepak Sibal and Rupinderjit Chahal JJ. The petitioners asked the Court to declare s.147A “ultra vires Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 265 of the Indian Constitution” and, on that declaration, to quash the notices their jurisdictional officers had issued them. The Court's concluding declaration could not be read in its own words for this entry, so it is not set out here and not paraphrased. What the outcome was is not in doubt: five days later the same Court allowed Rudra Alloys Private Limited v. ACIT, CWP-21009-2025, on 15 September 2026, “in terms of Jyoti Sareen's case”, quashing a s.148 notice of 28 June 2025; and the Union carried the judgment to the Supreme Court.
On 18 September 2026 the Supreme Court granted leave and stayed it: Union of India v. Bharat Industrial Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., SLP(C) No. 33196 of 2026, J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran JJ, on appeal from one of the connected petitions in that batch. The order is three sentences: “Leave granted. The impugned judgment and order passed by the High Court shall remain stayed from its operation on the condition that the assessment and reassessment proceedings shall not proceed further till the final disposal of the main matter. Notify this appeal for final hearing on 03.12.2026.” Read the condition as it is written: it holds up assessment and reassessment proceedings, not assessment proceedings alone. So the position on the day this was written is that s.147A is on the statute book and operates, because the one judgment striking it down is stayed; that judgment is suspended, not gone; the Supreme Court has decided nothing on the merits; and the date that governs your planning is 3 December 2026, not the 30 September 2026 the April order asked the High Courts to aim at. A practitioner who tells a client the point is dead is wrong. A practitioner who tells a client the point is good is also wrong. A practitioner who tells a client nothing has happened since April is now wrong as well. No High Court decision upholding s.147A was found, and the Madras challenge (Revenue Bar Association v. Union of India, W.P. No. 21494 of 2026) was still at the listing stage on 7 September 2026 — but that is what was found, not a statement that no such decision exists.
The same Finance Act did a second thing to reassessment that has attracted far less attention and may matter more to you than section 147A. Section 292BC was inserted after section 292BB, also deemed in force from 1 April 2021, under the marginal note “Circumstances in which approvals by income-tax authority not to be invalid”. It reads: “Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act or in any judgment, order or decree of any Court, for the removal of doubts, it is hereby clarified that any approval given by an income-tax authority in relation to any assessment, reassessment or recomputation proceedings under this Act shall be deemed to be administrative and supervisory in nature and shall not be invalid or shall not be deemed to be invalid by reason of any insufficiency of the reasons recorded or by reason of any defect in the form or manner of its authentication or communication including whether digital signature have been appended to such approval or not, where such approval is granted electronically.” That is aimed at the other standard reassessment ground: that the specified authority under section 151 applied no mind, or that the approval was unsigned, or was never properly authenticated or communicated. If your grounds run “mechanical approval” or “the approval carries no digital signature”, read section 292BC before you rely on them. Note also what it does not say — it says nothing about an approval that was never obtained at all, and nothing about an approval given by the wrong authority. It cures defects in an approval; it does not supply a missing one.
Two more points from the same Act, one helpful to you. Section 148(1) now requires the notice to allow a period “not being less than thirty days from the date of such notice but not exceeding three months from the end of the month in which such notice is issued”. The thirty-day floor is new, inserted with effect from 30 March 2026; before that the sub-section carried only the three-month ceiling, so a notice giving seven days was within the section. If your notice issued on or after 30 March 2026 and gave you less than thirty days, that is a point on the face of the notice. And it is worth knowing what was left alone: the Finance Act 2026 does not amend section 147, section 148A, section 149, section 151 or section 151A. The reopening clock in section 149 and the sanction in section 151, with its split at three years, stand exactly as they did, and section 151A remains on the statute book — section 147A overrides it for the purpose of sections 148 and 148A rather than repealing it.
The second question — what happens where the assessment has already been completed on the back of such a notice, as against a notice still at show-cause stage — has a cleaner answer than it looks. The three decisions worth reading are all on the same side of the s.151A question. The difference between them is one of posture, not of principle. In Hitesh Ramniklal Shah v. ACIT (Writ Petition No. 3053 of 2022 with connected petitions, Bombay High Court, 7 May 2024, K.R. Shriram and Dr Neela Gokhale JJ) the Court, following Hexaware, held that “the notices issued in these petitions by the JAO under Section 148 of the Act are hereby quashed and set aside. In case any reassessment orders are passed, the same also will stand quashed and set aside. So also, the consequential demand notices or penalty notices, if any, will also stand quashed and set aside.” That is conditional and forward-looking, so it does not settle what happens to an assessment already framed. In Bharat Kumar v. DCIT (D.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 22663/2025, Rajasthan High Court at Jodhpur, 19 November 2025, Dr Pushpendra Singh Bhati and Anuroop Singhi JJ) the Court did reach one, quashing both the notice of 27 March 2024 and the assessment order of 23 March 2025 passed on it. And in Ashok Gupta v. DCIT (D.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 19507/2025, Rajasthan High Court at Jaipur, 15 January 2026, Sanjeev Prakash Sharma ACJ and Mrs Sangeeta Sharma J) the Court did not refuse relief: it applied its own earlier decisions that the jurisdictional officer cannot issue the notice, declined to pass an order that would make the pending first appeal redundant, disposed of the writ, and directed the Commissioner (Appeals) to decide within fifteen days “following the judgment already rendered by this Court relating to quashing of the proceedings based on the notice issued by the Jurisdictional Assessing Officer”. So where a first appeal is already on foot, expect the court to send the point to that appeal — but it sends it there to be applied, not to be reopened. None of the three was decided with s.147A in view.
What a completed assessment means for you is different again after the two interim orders. Neither of them undoes an assessment already framed. The stay of 10 April 2026 is of further assessment and reassessment proceedings under the impugned notices, and it is subject to whatever terms your High Court imposed. The stay of 18 September 2026 holds up assessment and reassessment proceedings until the appeal is finally disposed of. Both look forward. If your assessment is already framed, the appeal is where the ground has to be kept alive, and it has to be kept alive as a ground of want of jurisdiction so that it is not treated as waived by participation.
None of this stops mattering on 1 April 2026. The Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed that day by section 536(1) of the Income-tax Act, 2025, but section 536(2) keeps it running for proceedings about earlier tax years however late they are taken — and a reassessment is exactly such a proceeding. Income earned in financial year 2025-26 stays under the 1961 Act and is assessed in assessment year 2026-27, the last assessment year under the old Act. Section 147A will therefore be argued for years after the Act it sits in has gone. The Income-tax Act, 2025 has no counterpart to it: its reassessment chapter runs from section 279 to section 285 and answers section by section to the old sections 147 to 152 with nothing left over, and section 280, which is the new section 148, carries no deeming about who the Assessing Officer is. The Finance Act 2026 did amend section 280, but only to put the same thirty-day floor into it.
This was for three years the most commonly taken reassessment ground in writ petitions, and a great deal of pending litigation — and a good many appeals where the ground is the only ground — now turns on whether a retrospective clarification can validate proceedings that several High Courts had held to be without jurisdiction. One High Court has said it cannot, the Supreme Court has stayed that judgment, and the answer is due after 3 December 2026.
Section 292BC is the reason to re-read your grounds of appeal even if you never took the faceless point. Between them the two new sections reach the two commonest technical attacks on a reassessment — who issued the notice, and whether the approval behind it was real — and both reach back to 1 April 2021, which is the first year of the present reassessment scheme. Advice given on either point before April 2026 needs re-checking before it is used.
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?
Every page in this library links to what it was written from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
