An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, dated 31 December 2021. Issued under section 119.
An order of the Board under section 119 in partial modification of its order of 19th October, 2020, which had restricted the power of survey after the Taxation and Other Laws (Relaxation and Amendment of Certain Provisions) Act, 2020 confined section 133A action to the Investigation Directorates and the TDS charges. This order rewrites parts of that scheme, dealing in particular with the TDS charges and with the international taxation and transfer pricing wing.
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.
Verification or survey under section 133A by the TDS charges is to be conducted by the officers of those charges, with the approval of the Principal Chief Commissioner or Chief Commissioner (TDS), or of the jurisdictional Chief Commissioner of the TDS charge as the case may be. In the international taxation and transfer pricing wing, a survey on a TDS matter needs the approval of a collegium of the Principal Chief Commissioner or Chief Commissioner (International Taxation and Transfer Pricing) together with the Chief Commissioner (TDS) or the regional Principal Chief Commissioner, and is conducted by officers of both wings. A survey on any other matter in that wing needs a collegium of the Principal Chief Commissioner or Chief Commissioner (International Taxation and Transfer Pricing) and the Director General of Income-tax (Investigation), and is conducted by the Investigation Wing with officers of that wing included. Supervisory officers must keep each survey within the scope the collegium approved.
After the 2020 amendment the survey power no longer sat with the ordinary assessing officer, and the Board's order of 19th October, 2020 had allocated it to the Investigation Directorates and the TDS charges. That allocation left gaps where a survey was needed on an international taxation or transfer pricing matter, and left the approval level for TDS surveys unclear. The Board therefore restated the position, fixing the approving authority for each situation and requiring a collegium wherever two wings have an interest.
This binds the department and regulates who among its officers may act. It gives the person surveyed no right of his own, but the point is not academic to him: a survey conducted by an officer or with an approval outside this scheme is open to challenge. It does not bind the Tribunal or a court, which look at section 133A and the 2020 amendment, though the Board's own limits may bear on the officer's competence.
Issued 31st December, 2021 and effective immediately, in partial modification of the Board's order of 19th October, 2020. No expiry is stated.
Check who approved the survey and at what level before anything else; the approval differs between a TDS survey, an international taxation survey on a TDS matter and any other international taxation survey, and two of the three require a collegium. Note also that this order modifies parts of the order of 19th October, 2020 and cannot be read in isolation from it.
Any verification or survey u/s 133A of the Act by the TDS charges shall be conducted by its officers
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, 31 December 2021. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
| Under the Income-tax Act, 1961 | Now, in the Income-tax Act, 2025 |
|---|---|
| section 133A | section 253, section 261 |
| section 119 | section 239 |
They recorded your statement in a survey. Can the addition rest on that alone?
You surrendered the amount to buy peace and avoid litigation. Does that stop the penalty?
A partner surrendered income during a survey and we have since reconciled the stock. Can we withdraw it?
After a survey the TDS officer says my consultant doctors are employees and wants 192 instead of 194J. Is he right?
The bank keeps a small percentage of every credit card sale before crediting me. Should I have deducted tax at source on it under section 194H?
The department is justifying my search warrant with discrepancies it discovered after the satisfaction note was recorded. Can material found later prop up the authorisation?
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.
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. Only the modified sub-paragraphs 1(i), 1(iii) and 5 came through the text layer; the remaining paragraphs of the order, and the unmodified parts of the parent order of 19.10.2020, could not be read.