An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 225/53/2024-ITA-II, dated 18 March 2024. Issued under section 119.
A short order of the Board under section 119 directing that every income-tax office in India stay open on the last three days of financial year 2023-24. Those three days fell awkwardly: 29th March, 2024 was a closed holiday, 30th March a Saturday and 31st March, the closing day of the financial year, a Sunday. The order is expressly issued for administrative convenience so that work standing at the year end can be finished.
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 Board records that the financial year 2023-24 closes on 31st March, 2024, a Sunday, that 30th March is a Saturday and that 29th March is a closed holiday. On that footing it directs that all income-tax offices throughout India shall remain open on the 29th, 30th and 31st of March, 2024, so that pending departmental work can be completed. The order states in terms that the direction is issued for administrative convenience by the Board in exercise of its powers under section 119. It says nothing about counters, about the acceptance of any particular class of filing, or about time limits under any provision, and it grants no extension of any kind.
The end of a financial year is the busiest point in the department's calendar. Time-barring assessments, recovery, refund release and the closing of collection figures all fall due on 31st March, and in 2024 all three of the closing days were non-working. Without a direction the offices would have been shut through them. The Board therefore opened the offices for those three days so that year-end work would not spill over into the next financial year.
Purely a direction to the department's own establishment; it binds the officers and the offices and nobody else. It puts no obligation on an assessee to appear or to file on those days and confers no right on him. It does not touch any statutory time limit and does not bind the Tribunal or a court, neither of which is affected by when the department chooses to keep its offices open.
Issued 18th March, 2024 and spent on 29th, 30th and 31st March, 2024. It sets no deadline for anyone and extends none.
Do not read this as an extension. Offices being open on a holiday does not move a limitation date, a due date for filing or a date for payment, and nothing in the order says it does. It is also a direction inwards, so an assessee who attended on one of those days cannot found a claim on it. Read it only as an administrative arrangement for the year end.
all the Income Tax Offices throughout India shall remain open on 29th, 30th and 31st March, 2024
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 225/53/2024-ITA-II, 18 March 2024. 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.