An order issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, as F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, dated 6 September 2021. Issued under section 144B(2).
An order of the Board under sub-section (2) of section 144B, the companion to the section 119 order of the same date. Sub-section (2) lets the Board specify the territory, persons, income and cases in which faceless assessment operates, and the Board had done so by its order of 31st March, 2021. This order modifies that specification by taking out cases the Income Tax Business Application cannot hold and cases where there is no PAN.
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 order recites the position under the order of 31st March, 2021, by which assessment proceedings pending as on 31.03.2021 and those initiated on or after 01.04.2021, other than cases assigned to Central Charges and to International Taxation Charges, were to be made under section 144B. It then provides that cases where pendency could not be created on ITBA because of technical reasons, and cases not having a PAN, shall also be excluded from the purview of section 144B. Those cases therefore fall to the jurisdictional assessing officer under the ordinary procedure. The order states that it comes into effect immediately.
The Board issued the same exclusion twice on the same day, once under section 144B(2) and once under section 119, evidently to rest it on the specific power as well as the general one. The substance is practical: faceless assessment is conducted entirely within ITBA, and a case that cannot be created on that system, or a person with no PAN, cannot be processed through it at all. Without the exclusion such cases could not lawfully be assessed by any route.
This binds the department, deciding which of its officers takes the case. It creates no right in the assessee, who cannot claim a faceless assessment under it or object to one because of it. It does not bind the Tribunal or a court, which will examine whether a case truly fell outside section 144B and whether the Board's specification under sub-section (2) covered it.
Issued 6th September, 2021 and effective immediately, modifying the order of 31st March, 2021. It was itself modified further on 22nd September, 2021 and 16th December, 2021.
Read this order with the section 119 order of the same date, which makes the identical exclusion under the general power; the two travel together. The exclusion rests on a factual assertion about the department's systems, so where an assessment is made outside section 144B on this footing the file should show what the technical difficulty was.
shall also be excluded from the purview of section 144B
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, order F. No. 187/3/2020-ITA-I, 6 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 |
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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.