BMA s.81

BMA s.81 — the law in short

What the courts have decided on section BMA s.81, in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.

• Shantanu Bhowmick v DDIT (Inv) ITATHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  The department cannot produce the s.10(1) notice for the year it assessed. Is that cured by s.81?
  No. Where the Revenue could not produce any notice under s.10(1) for the assessment year in question, the Tribunal held that the absence of a valid notice for the relevant year is not a curable defect under s.81 of the Black Money Act. Both the assessment under s.10 and the consequent penalty order of Rs 1,84,11,360 were quashed.
• Ajay Kumar Patel v Addl. CIT ITATHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  The s.10 notice does not say which year it relates to, and my foreign account was inherited and already put in a revised return. Can the assessment stand?
  No, on both counts. A notice under s.10(1) that omits the relevant financial year, coupled with delay in initiating the proceedings, goes to the root of jurisdiction, and s.81 of the Black Money Act, being in pari materia with s.292B of the Income-tax Act, protects only clerical or technical mistakes and not jurisdictional infirmities. Separately, an inherited foreign deposit whose source is explained and which was disclosed in revised returns and by a letter to the jurisdictional officer before the s.10(1) notice is not an undisclosed asset within s.2(11), and historic interest of earlier years cannot be charged under the Black Money Act at all.
• Anandi Kaushik Laijawala v DDIT (Inv.) ITATHelps taxpayerNo later treatment found
  The officer issued several s.10 notices over two years and assessed one of the years. Does it matter which year the notice falls in?
  It is decisive. Where the asset was acquired before the Act commenced and no declaration was made under s.59, s.72(c) deems it to have been acquired in the year in which the s.10 notice is issued, so the assessment can only be for the assessment year that follows that year. A notice issued in April 2018 could therefore support an assessment only for assessment year 2019-20, and the Mumbai Bench quashed assessments made for assessment year 2018-19. A defective first notice could not be saved by a corrigendum or by s.81.

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.