Section 292BB

Section 292BB — the law in short

What the courts have decided on section 292BB, in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.

• CIT v Laxman Das Khandelwal Supreme CourtHelps taxpayer
  No s.143(2) notice was issued at all. Does s.292BB save the assessment?
  No. The notice is a jurisdictional requirement and its complete absence makes the assessment void. Section 292BB is a fiction about service — for it to apply, the notice must have emanated from the department in the first place.
• Asha Dubey v Union of India High CourtHelps taxpayer
  They issued a 148 notice in my late husband's name. Can they just issue a fresh one now?
  Not if the s.149 period has run out. Allahabad held that a notice on a dead person is void ab initio and that an order quashing such a notice is not a 'finding or direction' under s.150(1), so it cannot be used to reopen limitation.
• CIT (International Taxation) v Oracle Systems Corporation High CourtHelps taxpayerJudgment not reachable
  No s.143(2) notice was ever issued. Does s.292BB save the assessment because you took part?
  No. Section 292BB reaches only the manner in which a notice was served and cannot cure the absence of a notice altogether — but that fuller proposition is the Tribunal's, reproduced in this judgment at para 8, and is better cited to CIT v. Laxman Das Khandelwal (SC) and Pr. CIT v. Silver Line (Delhi). This Court's own step was narrower: no notice under s.143(2) having been issued at all, the question of a notice being deemed to be a valid notice under s.292BB did not arise, and the appeals were dismissed as raising no substantial question of law.
• Meet Lalwani v ITO High CourtHelps taxpayer
  I filed the death certificate and they still issued the 148 notice in my mother's name. Is it valid?
  No. The Madhya Pradesh High Court quashed the s.148 notice and the s.148A(d) order. Once the Department knew of the death, issuing the notice in the deceased's name was a failure to acquire jurisdiction, and ss.292B, 292BB and 159 do not cure it.
• Savita Kapila v ACIT High CourtHelps taxpayer
  A section 148 notice was issued in my late father's name after he had died. Is the reassessment valid because we never told the department?
  No. The Delhi High Court quashed the notice and everything that followed. Issuing the notice in the name of the correct person, and not a dead person, is not a procedural requirement but a condition precedent to a valid notice, so the jurisdictional requirement of section 148 was not met. No notice was ever issued to the legal heir within the limitation in section 149(1)(b); the proceedings were simply transferred to her PAN. Section 159 does not help the department where nothing was pending in the assessee's lifetime, and there is no statutory obligation on legal heirs to intimate the death. Sections 292B and 292BB do not cure it.
• PCIT v Jai Shiv Shankar Traders High CourtCuts both ways
  If the assessee says its original return should be treated as the return in response to s.148, must the Assessing Officer still issue a fresh s.143(2) notice?
  The assessee told the Assessing Officer that its original return be treated as filed in response to the s.148 notice. The officer then completed the reassessment without issuing any notice under s.143(2). The Delhi High Court held the omission fatal and held that s.292BB cures defective service of a notice, not the failure to issue one at all.
• CIT v Chetan Gupta High CourtHelps taxpayer
  The section 148 notice was served on somebody at my old business premises, not on me. My accountant then wrote in objecting. Is the reassessment good?
  No. The Delhi High Court held that issue and service of the section 148 notice on the assessee, or on an agent he has empowered in writing to receive it, are jurisdictional requirements, not procedure. Service on an accountant at premises the assessee had not given as his address, whose authority the Revenue could not establish, was no service. Objecting through chartered accountants and taking part in the proceedings is not a waiver. Section 292BB is prospective from 1 April 2008 and, since the assessee objected before the reassessment was completed, its proviso applies anyway. The reassessment was quashed.
• ACIT v JD Ispat Pvt Ltd ITATHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  Same point, at Tribunal level: can taking part in a reassessment cure a missing s.143(2) notice?
  No. Section 292BB cures defects in service of notice but does not cure the complete absence of the notice. The reassessment was quashed and a Rs 2.33 crore s.68 addition went with it.
• ACIT v Md. Illyas Hussain — the section reads "issue", not "serve": the Revenue's side of the section 143(2) point in a block assessment ITATHelps departmentNo later treatment found
  The Commissioner (Appeals) annulled the block assessment because no section 143(2) notice was served. Can the department save it by showing the notice was issued?
  The Patna Tribunal held that it could. It read section 158BC as requiring only the ISSUE of a notice under section 143(2) and not its service, found on the record that a notice had been issued on 20 August 1999 and received at the assessee's address, and added that in any event the assessee's block return, filed after the time allowed, was an invalid return so that no section 143(2) notice was required at all. It set aside the annulment and restored the appeal to the Commissioner (Appeals) to be decided on the merits.
• 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.

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.