An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, dated 21 June 2021. Issued under section 138(1)(a)(i).
An order of the Board under section 138(1)(a)(i), the provision that lets the Board authorise an income-tax authority to furnish information about an assessee to a person who applies for it. It makes the Director General of Income-tax (Systems), New Delhi the specified income-tax authority for giving deductors and collectors the information they need in order to work out whether a payee is a 'specified person' attracting the higher rates in sections 206AB and 206CCA.
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 order directs that the Director General of Income-tax (Systems), New Delhi shall be the specified income-tax authority for furnishing information to a tax deductor or tax collector who is registered on the reporting portal of Project Insight with a valid TAN, so that the deductor or collector can identify specified persons for the purposes of sections 206AB and 206CCA. The information furnished through the functionality 'Compliance Check for Section 206AB & 206CCA' is the name as it stands in the PAN record, masked; the PAN allotment date; the PAN-Aadhaar link status, shown as linked, not linked, exempt or not applicable; and whether the person is a specified person under sections 206AB and 206CCA, as a yes or no. The Director General is to notify the procedure and format for the functionality after taking the Board's approval.
Sections 206AB and 206CCA require tax to be deducted or collected at a higher rate from a person who has not filed his return of income and in whose case tax deducted or collected exceeds the prescribed amount. A deductor cannot know that from his own records; the fact sits in the department's database, and asking every payee to prove his filing history would be unworkable. Section 138 permits the department to share the position, and the order puts a machine-readable answer in the deductor's hands.
The order binds the income-tax authorities: it tells the Director General (Systems) whom he may inform and exactly what he may disclose. A deductor gets access but no right against the department, and an order of this kind cannot add to or cut down his liability under sections 206AB and 206CCA. No court or Tribunal is bound by it.
Issued in June 2021; the functionality operates from the date the Director General of Income-tax (Systems) notifies the procedure and format with the Board's approval. No expiry is stated.
The compliance check answers a status question and nothing more. A 'yes' or 'no' from the portal does not decide the rate — sections 206AB and 206CCA do — and a deductor who deducts short cannot offer the portal as his authority. The name comes back masked, so identity still has to be satisfied independently. Keep the response, with its date, on the deduction file.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes('CBDT'), in exercise of powers conferred under section 138(1)(a)(i) of Income-tax Act, 1961 (Act), hereby directs that Director General of Income-tax (Systems), New Delhi shall be the specified income-tax authority for furnishing information to the 'Tax Deductor/Tax Collector'
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order, 21 June 2021. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
| Under the Income-tax Act, 1961 | Now, in the Income-tax Act, 2025 |
|---|---|
| section 138 | section 258 |
| section 206AB | no counterpart recorded |
| section 206CCA | no counterpart recorded |
What here is the Board’s and what is ours. The document is the Central Board of Direct Taxes’ own. 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 file number and the printed day of the date were not legible in the scan (the header extracts as garbled characters), so number is left blank and the date is taken from the Board's own listing of this order. Text beyond paragraph 3 could not be confirmed.