A communication issued by the Central Board of Direct Taxes, dated 18 October 2019.
A public notice from the Tax Policy and Legislation division inviting applications from banks and payment system providers. Section 269SU, inserted by the Finance (No. 2) Act, 2019, requires a person carrying on business above a turnover threshold to provide facilities for accepting payment through prescribed electronic modes. The modes have first to be prescribed, and this notice asks the industry to put its payment systems forward for consideration.
This one does not fall neatly into the Board's usual classes — it is a letter, a memorandum, a consultation paper or something else the department has published in this collection. What it is, and what weight it carries, is set out below.
The notice records that section 269SU requires every person having a business turnover of more than fifty crore rupees to provide facilities for accepting payments through prescribed electronic modes, and that section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 provides that no bank or system provider shall impose any charge on a payer or a beneficiary for payment through a mode prescribed under section 269SU. The provisions take effect from 1st November, 2019 and the Central Government is to prescribe the modes. Applications are invited from banks and payment system providers operating under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 for their systems to be considered as eligible electronic modes. An application must give the provider's name, address, PAN, licence or registration particulars and a description of the payment system. Applications were to be sent by e-mail by 2nd November, 2019.
Section 269SU obliges large businesses to offer prescribed electronic payment modes, and section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act stops banks and providers charging for them. Neither works until the modes are named. Rather than choose them on its own, the Board asked the industry to apply, so that what is prescribed is something that exists, is authorised under the payment systems law, and can be offered without a charge to either side.
The notice is addressed to banks and payment system providers, not to taxpayers, and it decides nothing. A provider that applies gets consideration and no more. A business within section 269SU takes its obligation from the section and from the modes finally prescribed, not from this invitation. It binds neither the Board in what it eventually prescribes, nor a court or the Tribunal.
Issued on 18th October, 2019. Section 269SU and section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 were to take effect from 1st November, 2019, and applications were to reach the Board by 2nd November, 2019.
This is an invitation, not the prescription. A business cannot discharge section 269SU by offering a mode that merely applied — only a prescribed mode counts, and the prescription came separately. Note the turnover threshold stated in the notice and the effective date of 1st November, 2019, because the obligation, and the consequence of not meeting it, run from the section itself.
every person having a business turnover of more than Rs 50 Crore shall mandatorily provide facilities for accepting payments through prescribed electronic modes
— the Central Board of Direct Taxes, communication, 18 October 2019. Read it in the department’s own PDF.
| Under the Income-tax Act, 1961 | Now, in the Income-tax Act, 2025 |
|---|---|
| section 269SU | section 187 |
What here is the Board’s and what is ours. The document is the Central Board of Direct Taxes’ own. 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 document carries an FTS number in the header which extracts with OCR artefacts, so number is left blank.