An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 370153/39/2020-TPL, dated 12 January 2021. Issued under section 119.
A corrigendum issued by the Tax Policy and Legislation division to the Board's order under section 119 dated 11th January, 2021, by which the representations for a further extension of the due dates for assessment year 2020-21 were rejected. That order had compared India's extensions with those of other countries in a table at paragraph 7. This corrigendum corrects two rows of that table and adds the sources for it.
This is an order of the Board. An order is issued under a power the Act itself gives the Board — most often section 119, which lets it direct its own officers and, in the cases the section names, relax a requirement. Read the enabling words before deciding how far it reaches: the power is administrative, and it cannot rewrite the charge.
The corrigendum substitutes the entries against Singapore and Brazil in the table at paragraph 7 of the order dated 11th January, 2021. The Singapore row is corrected to read 2019-2020, 18th April 2020, 31st May 2020, 15th December 2020 and 15th January 2021. The Brazil row is corrected to read 2019-2020, 30th April 2020, 30th June 2020, 31st July 2020 and 30th September 2020. A footnote is inserted below paragraph 7 citing nine sources for the foreign due dates, including the revenue authorities of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Canada and Brazil. Nothing else in the order is disturbed and the rejection of the representations stands.
The order of 11th January, 2021 rested part of its reasoning on the proposition that no other country had extended its filing dates as far as India had. That reasoning was only as sound as the table behind it, and the order had been passed in answer to a High Court direction to consider the matter. Two of the country entries were wrong and the table carried no sources. The corrigendum repairs both.
A correction to the Board's own order, binding the department exactly as the order does. It gives the assessee nothing: the due dates for assessment year 2020-21 are unchanged and the refusal to extend them stands. It does not bind a court examining whether that refusal was reasonable, although the corrected table is what a court would now be shown.
Dated 12th January, 2021, and it reads back into the order of 11th January, 2021 from that order's date.
Read the corrigendum with the order and never on its own — the operative refusal lies in the order. The correction matters only where the comparative table is being relied on, which is in argument about whether the Board applied its mind. Check the Singapore and Brazil figures in whichever version of the order you are quoting, since the uncorrected table circulated first.
Singapore | 2019-2020 | 18th April, 2020 | 31st May, 2020 | 15th December, 2020 | 15th January, 2021
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 370153/39/2020-TPL, 12 January 2021. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
| Under the Income-tax Act, 1961 | Now, in the Income-tax Act, 2025 |
|---|---|
| section 119 | section 239 |
| section 139 | section 2, section 263, section 349 |
| section 44AB | section 2, section 58, section 63 |
The CBDT rejected my condonation application without dealing with my reasons. Can I challenge that?
Can interest under ss.234A, 234B and 234C be waived?
Our amalgamation was sanctioned long after the deadline for a revised return. Must the department accept revised returns filed to give effect to the scheme?
The AO says I sold below market value and wants to tax the difference. Can he do that?
A Board circular supports my reading of the section. Can I hold the Tribunal or the High Court to it, and can a circular settle what a provision means?
I did not tick s.115BAA in the return and filed Form 10-IC late. Can I still get the concessional rate?
What here is the Board’s and what is ours. The document is the Central Board of Direct Taxes’ own. Its number, its date and the words quoted above are reproduced from the Board’s own PDF, which is here. Everything else on this page is ours: the plain-English account of what the document is and what it does, the reading of which provision it turns on, the note on what to watch, and the choice of cases. Where our account and the document part, the document governs.
An order of the Board binds the department, not you and not a court. The Board writes to its own officers. An assessee may hold the department to an order or an instruction that helps him; the department cannot hold an assessee to one that hurts him, and the Tribunal and the courts decide the law for themselves. This is the most common mistake made with this material, and it is worth making twice: a direction of the Board is not a section of the Act.
We did not read all of it. The department’s file returned only part of this document to us, so what is written above is written from the part we could read. Open the PDF before you rely on it.
What we could not settle. The operative sentence of substitution could not be transcribed word for word from the scan; the quote reproduces the corrected Singapore row of the table instead. The nine sources in the inserted footnote were identified but not transcribed in full.