An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. CIT(NaFAC)-1/2021-22, dated 29 June 2021. Issued under sub-para (xi) of Para 2 of the Faceless Penalty Scheme, 2021.
A one-paragraph order of the National Faceless Assessment Centre designating a web portal. The Faceless Penalty Scheme, 2021, notified by Notification No. 2 of 2021, works through a 'designated portal' defined in sub-para (xi) of Para 2 of the Scheme, and that portal has to be designated before the Scheme can operate. This order makes the designation, naming www.incometax.gov.in, the department's e-filing portal, for the purposes of faceless penalty.
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 designates the web portal www.incometax.gov.in as the 'designated portal' in terms of sub-para (xi) of Para 2 of the National Faceless Penalty Scheme, 2021, notified by Notification No. 2 of 2021. From the designation onwards, every reference in that Scheme to the designated portal is a reference to www.incometax.gov.in. The order records that it issues with the approval of the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-tax (National Faceless Assessment Centre), New Delhi, and it is copied to the web masters of www.incometax.gov.in and www.incometaxindia.gov.in so that it goes up on both departmental sites. It does nothing else: it contains no time limit, no procedure and no substantive direction on penalty.
The Faceless Penalty Scheme, 2021 was built on electronic delivery. Its working turns on a 'designated portal', but the Scheme does not itself name a website; that is left to be designated separately. At the same time the department was moving its taxpayer-facing services to a new e-filing portal at www.incometax.gov.in. Until the designation was made the Scheme's machinery had no fixed address, and this order supplies it.
The designation is addressed inward: it tells the faceless penalty machinery and the department's web masters which site is the Scheme's portal. Like any order of the Board it constrains the department alone. It puts no obligation on an assessee, and neither the Tribunal nor a court is bound by it — an assessee may rely on it where it helps him and disregard it where it does not.
Dated 29.06.2021 and operative from that date. No end date and no deadline are stated in it.
Do not read the designation as the source of the faceless penalty procedure. It fixes the address only; the Scheme and the notification behind it govern everything else. Note too that the department runs two sites — www.incometax.gov.in for filing and www.incometaxindia.gov.in for its published material — and only the first is the designated portal.
I am directed to hereby designate the web portal www.incometax.gov.in as the 'designated portal' for the purpose of Faceless Penalty in terms of sub-para(xi) of Para-2 of National Faceless Penalty Scheme,2021 (Notification No.2 of 2021).
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. CIT(NaFAC)-1/2021-22, 29 June 2021. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
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.
What we could not settle. The running serial printed after 'F. No. CIT(NaFAC)-1/2021-22' was not legible in the scan. The order cites no section of the Income-tax Act, 1961, so sections is left empty; it works off the Faceless Penalty Scheme, 2021 and Notification No. 2 of 2021.