Section 285BB — the law in short
What the courts have decided on section 285BB, in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.
-
DCIT v Zaitoon Farouq Esmail
ITATHelps taxpayerValidity unconfirmed
The officer has added the whole of a property purchase shown against my client's PAN in the AIS, although my client never bought it. Is a reported entry enough to sustain an addition?
No. The Mumbai Bench dismissed the Revenue's appeal and upheld the deletion of a Rs 2.53 crore addition made on the strength of reported information alone, holding that the Assessing Officer is not expected to make an addition mathematically simply on the basis of information without verification of the facts. The decisive fact was that the names of the purchasers in the reported data were different persons and only the assessee's PAN had been tagged against them.
-
Statutory position — section 285BB and rule 114-I: what the Annual Information Statement is, and what it is not
CBDT Circulars & InstructionsCuts both ways
The notice says an amount 'appears in your AIS' and proposes to add it. What is the AIS in law, and does an entry in it prove anything?
Section 285BB requires the prescribed income-tax authority to UPLOAD, in the assessee's registered account, an annual information statement containing information which is in the possession of an income-tax authority, in the prescribed form and manner. That is the whole of the section: it is a disclosure obligation on the department, not a charging provision, not a deeming provision and not an evidentiary one. Rule 114-I lists the six heads of information that go into it and prescribes Form No. 26AS.
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.