An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 275/38/2017-IT(B), dated 24 May 2019. Issued under section 119.
An order under section 119 giving time to deductors in Odisha after cyclone Fani. The cyclone struck the state on 3 May 2019 and disrupted normal life and the communication systems, so deductors there could not meet the May and June compliance dates. The Board pushes back three dates for that state alone: deposit of tax deducted for April 2019, the quarterly TDS statement for the last quarter of financial year 2018-19, and the issue of the certificates in Form 16 and Form 16A.
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.
For deductors in Odisha the Board extends three dates. Tax deducted at source for the month of April 2019 may be deposited by 20 May 2019 instead of 7 May 2019. The quarterly TDS statement for the fourth quarter of financial year 2018-19 may be filed by 30 June 2019 instead of 31 May 2019. The certificates of tax deducted in Form 16 and Form 16A may be issued by 15 July 2019 instead of 15 June 2019. The relief is confined to deductors in Odisha and to those three compliances; no other date and no other state is touched.
Cyclone Fani made landfall in Odisha on 3 May 2019. Normal life and the communication systems in the state were disrupted and deductors could not deposit the tax, file the quarterly statement or issue the certificates on the ordinary dates. Missing those dates carries its own consequences under the Act. The Board used its power under section 119 to move the three dates for the affected state so that deductors are not visited with those consequences for a failure outside their control.
The order binds the assessing and TDS authorities dealing with Odisha deductors: for these three compliances the extended dates are the due dates, and default cannot be worked out from the original ones. A deductor in Odisha may hold the department to it. A deductor elsewhere takes nothing from it. If the reach of the relief were disputed, the Tribunal would read the order for what it says — it is not bound by the Board.
Operates on April 2019 TDS (new date 20 May 2019), the fourth-quarter statement for financial year 2018-19 (30 June 2019) and Forms 16 and 16A (15 July 2019). The order itself is dated 24 May 2019.
The order is dated 24 May 2019 but the extended deposit date for April 2019 is 20 May 2019, so that limb works retrospectively — check that the deposit actually went in by 20 May. The relief follows the location of the deductor, not of the deductee. Nothing here touches the first-quarter statement for financial year 2019-20.
the Central Board of Direct Taxes, in exercise of its powers under section 119 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, hereby-
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 275/38/2017-IT(B), 24 May 2019. 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 |
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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 order recites only section 119; it does not name the sections or rules that fix the three dates it extends, so the provisions list above records section 119 alone. The F. No. is transcribed from a scan that renders some digits imperfectly.