An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, dated 22 September 2021. Issued under section 119.
An order of the Board under section 119 adding a further exception to its order of 13th August, 2020, read with the order of 31st March, 2021 and as already modified on 6th September, 2021, which had required assessment orders to be passed through the National Faceless Assessment Centre. The exception is confined to cases whose limitation was expiring on 30th September, 2021 and which the faceless machinery could not carry to completion in the time left.
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.
To the existing exceptions, which covered cases assigned to Central Charges, cases assigned to International Tax Charges, and cases where pendency could not be created on ITBA for technical reasons or where there was no PAN, the order adds assessment orders in cases set aside to be made de novo or to be made under section 147, for which the time limit for completion expires on 30.09.2021, and which cannot be completed in accordance with the procedure laid down in section 144B because of technical or procedural constraints within the remaining limitation. Those cases are to be completed by the jurisdictional assessing officer outside the faceless route. The order states that it comes into effect immediately.
A case set aside for fresh assessment, or one taken up under section 147, often comes back to the department late in its limitation. Faceless assessment moves through several units and cannot be compressed indefinitely, and in September 2021 the department was also working through the disruption of the new e-filing portal. Where the remaining period could not accommodate the section 144B procedure, the alternative was an assessment that failed for limitation. The Board removed the procedural requirement for that narrow class.
The order binds the department. It permits the field to complete a defined class of case outside the faceless procedure and settles nothing in the assessee's favour or against him; he has no right to choose the route. It does not bind the Tribunal or a court, which will examine whether the case genuinely fell within the exception and whether the Board could lawfully create it, testing the assessment against section 144B itself.
Issued 22nd September, 2021 and effective immediately. It reaches cases pending with the assessing officer on or after 11.09.2021 whose limitation expired on 30.09.2021, and is spent once that date passed.
The exception is drawn tightly: only set-aside or section 147 cases, only where limitation expired on 30.09.2021, and only where section 144B could not be complied with in the time left. An assessment made outside section 144B without all three conditions cannot shelter behind this order, and the Board's power to exclude cases from a statutory procedure has itself been litigated.
cannot be completed as per the procedure laid down under Section 144B
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, 22 September 2021. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
| Under the Income-tax Act, 1961 | Now, in the Income-tax Act, 2025 |
|---|---|
| section 144B | section 273 |
| section 147 | section 279 |
| 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.