Section 147A

Section 147A — the law in short

What the courts have decided on section 147A, in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.

• ITO v Tej Partap Singh Supreme CourtCuts both ways
  The High Court quashed my s.148 notice because the ward officer issued it instead of the faceless unit. Does that judgment still stand?
  No, not as it stands. On 10 April 2026 the Supreme Court set aside the High Court judgments that had quashed notices issued by the jurisdictional Assessing Officer, because s.147A, inserted by the Finance Act 2026 with effect from 1 April 2021, now defines the Assessing Officer for ss.148 and 148A as an officer other than the National Faceless Assessment Centre and the assessment units in s.144B(3). The Court remitted the matters, left the validity, scope, effect, retrospectivity and applicability of s.147A open for the High Courts, and stayed further assessment and reassessment proceedings in the meantime.
• Anshul Jain v PCIT Supreme CourtHelps department
  The order under section 148A(d) rejects everything I said and the section 148 notice has followed. Can I take it straight to the High Court?
  Usually not. The Supreme Court dismissed the assessee's petition against a High Court order refusing to interfere at that stage, saying that the notices had been issued after his objections were considered and that any grievance on the merits had to be taken to the Assessing Officer in the reassessment proceedings. It is an order dismissing a special leave petition with brief reasons, on a record that lists no counsel for the Revenue, and the same Court took a different line four months later in Red Chilli International Sales, where it set aside a refusal to entertain a writ that rested only on the existence of an alternative remedy. Read it as the ordinary rule and not as a bar, and read it today alongside section 147A, because what happens inside a reassessment is the most disturbed part of the Act.
• Synokem Pharmaceuticals Ltd v ACIT High CourtHelps departmentNo later treatment found
  The Supreme Court remitted my JAO reassessment case and gave four weeks to amend. Will the High Court actually let me amend to challenge s.147A?
  Not as of right. The Delhi High Court refused. Delhi had already held in T.K.S. Builder Pvt. Ltd. that the Faceless Assessing Officer and the Jurisdictional Assessing Officer have concurrent jurisdiction, so s.147A took nothing away from this petitioner; the writ petition had in any event already been dismissed. The court held that whatever little remained to be argued had been washed away by the amendment and rejected the amendment application as misconceived.
• Statutory position — the Finance Act, 2026 and reassessment: s.147A, s.292BC, the thirty-day floor in s.148(1), and ss.153(10) and 153B(1A) CBDT Circulars & InstructionsCuts both waysUnder appeal
  The Finance Act 2026 seems to have changed the reassessment rules backwards in time. What exactly did it change, from which dates, and which of my grounds has it taken away?
  The Finance Act, 2026 (No. 4 of 2026), assented to on 30 March 2026, amended the Income-tax Act, 1961 through clauses 4 to 33, and six of those clauses are about assessment and reassessment. Clause 9 inserted section 147A, deemed in force from 1 April 2021, which makes the Assessing Officer for sections 148 and 148A an officer other than the National Faceless Assessment Centre or a section 144B(3) assessment unit, notwithstanding any judgment, section 151A or any scheme under it; clause 33 inserted section 292BC, also deemed in force from 1 April 2021, which makes an approval in any assessment or reassessment administrative and supervisory in nature and immune to attack for insufficient reasons or a missing digital signature. Clause 10 gave the section 148 notice a thirty-day floor from 30 March 2026, clause 11 substituted section 150 from 1 February 2026, and clauses 12 and 13 inserted section 153(10) and section 153B(1A), reaching back to 2009, to fix when a draft order under section 144C(1) may be made. Sections 147, 148A, 149, 151 and 151A were not amended at all. Section 147A has since been struck down by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Jyoti Sareen v. Union of India on 10 September 2026, and that judgment was stayed by the Supreme Court on 18 September 2026, which hears the appeal on 3 December 2026.
• CBDT Instruction No. 1/2022 — the document the whole Ashish Agarwal exercise was run on CBDT Circulars & InstructionsHelps departmentPartly overruled — read this first
  My reassessment for an old year was restarted in 2022 on the strength of a Board instruction rather than a fresh notice. What does that instruction actually say, and how much of it is the Supreme Court's?
  This is the instruction, issued under s.119 a week after Union of India v Ashish Agarwal, that told every Assessing Officer how to work out that judgment on the roughly ninety thousand notices issued under the old reassessment law between 1 April 2021 and 30 June 2021. It directs that the judgment applies to all those notices whether or not they were challenged; that the notices travel back to their original dates and new s.149 is then applied at that point, so a fresh s.148 notice may issue for assessment years 2013-14 to 2015-16 only under s.149(1)(b) and for 2016-17 and 2017-18 under s.149(1)(a); that information and material need not be given at all where escaped income for 2013-14 to 2015-16 is less than fifty lakh rupees; and that in the remaining cases the material was to be supplied by 2 June 2022, the assessee had two weeks to reply, and an order under s.148A(d) was to follow with the approval of the specified authority under s.151. Three of those directions go further than the judgment does, and the courts have said so.

Listed strongest first: Supreme Court, then High Court, then Tribunal, then CBDT. Nothing here has yet been read in full by a chartered accountant — open an entry to see where it came from.