An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F.No. 225/02/2021-ITA.I, dated 11 February 2021. Issued under section 138(1)(a).
An order of the Central Board of Direct Taxes of 11 February 2021 under section 138(1)(a) of the Income-tax Act, 1961. It names the Director General of Income-tax (Systems), New Delhi as the specified authority for furnishing information to the Chief Executive Officer, Centre for e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, who had been notified the same day by Notification No. 05/2021 dated 11 February 2021 for the purposes of sub-clause (ii) of clause (a) of sub-section (1) of section 138. It is signed by an Under Secretary to the Government of India.
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.
Beyond naming the specified authority, the order sets out the mechanism of sharing. The notified authority of the Government of Karnataka is to furnish the PAN or Aadhaar of the relevant set of citizens to DGIT (Systems), together with the assessment year or years. On those input parameters DGIT (Systems) is to respond in two ways: by a flag of 'Yes', 'No' or 'Not Available' on the income-tax payee status of the PAN or Aadhaar shared, for the assessment years given; and by giving the PAN against the Aadhaar provided, where available. Nothing else is authorised to be furnished. The exchange is therefore a query-and-response on a list the State supplies, not a bulk transfer of returns or of income data.
Section 138(1)(a)(ii) lets the Board direct that information held under the Act be furnished to an officer notified in the public interest. The notification of 11 February 2021 named the Karnataka officer; this order says which income-tax authority may answer and, unusually for orders of this kind, writes the mechanism into the order itself rather than leaving it to a memorandum of understanding. The document gives no further reason and does not say what the State proposes to use the confirmation for.
It binds the department. DGIT (Systems) may answer such a query and no one else may. It does not bind the assessee and it does not bind a court or the Tribunal. A citizen whose taxpayer status is confirmed to the State under this order is not a party to it, is not required to be told, and takes no right from it.
From its date, 11 February 2021. No end date, review date or periodicity is stated, and no time limit is placed on answering a query.
Read the mechanism narrowly. What goes out is a Yes/No/Not Available flag on payee status and, where available, the PAN behind an Aadhaar — not income, not returns, not assessment particulars. The State must first supply the PAN or Aadhaar and the assessment years, so the department does not initiate. Unlike the MCA and NATGRID orders there is no MoU here, so the order itself is the whole of the terms.
hereby directs that Director General of Income-tax (Systems), New Delhi shall be the specified authority for furnishing information to Chief Executive Officer, Center for e-Governance, Government of Karnataka
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F.No. 225/02/2021-ITA.I, 11 February 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 |
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 signature block is garbled; the name is read as Rajarajeswari R., Under Secretary to the Government of India. The order names the 'Director General of Income-tax (Systems)' rather than the Principal Director General, which is what the scan shows. Notification No. 05/2021 dated 11 February 2021, on which the order rests, is not reproduced here. The body is scanned as 'Center for e-Governance'.