Statutory position — s.124: how an Assessing Officer gets jurisdiction over you, who decides a dispute about it, and the three deadlines in s.124(3) after which you cannot object at all
CBDT Circulars & InstructionsCuts both waysSuperseded by amendment
The notice has come from an officer in a place I have nothing to do with. Can I say he has no jurisdiction, who decides that, and have I already lost the point by filing my return and answering him?
Jurisdiction reaches an Assessing Officer through section 120: the Board issues directions, those directions may authorise another authority to issue written orders, and section 124(1) then gives the officer vested with an area jurisdiction over a business whose place or principal place is in that area and over every other person residing in it. A dispute about whether he has jurisdiction is not for him and not for the Tribunal in the first instance: section 124(2) sends it to the Principal Director General, Director General, Principal Chief Commissioner, Chief Commissioner, Principal Commissioner or Commissioner, and to the Board if two of them disagree. The provision that decides cases is section 124(3), which fixes three deadlines — one for a person who has filed a return, one for a person who has not, one where there has been a search or requisition — after which no person shall be entitled to call the jurisdiction in question at all. Section 124(4) then obliges the officer, on a timely objection he does not accept, to refer the matter for determination before he makes the assessment. Whether the section 124(3) bar is absolute is genuinely disputed: the Delhi and Karnataka High Courts have applied it against assessees, and the Gujarat High Court has held it no answer where no order under section 127 transferred the case at all. For a tax year beginning on or after 1 April 2026 the provision is section 242 of the Income-tax Act, 2025, where the bar sits in sub-section (4).
