Constitution Art. 142 — the law in short
What the courts have decided on section Constitution Art. 142, in one screen. Read this first; open an entry when you need the facts, the reasoning and the source.
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Union of India v Ashish Agarwal
Supreme CourtHelps department
What happened to the thousands of s.148 notices issued under the old rules after the law changed in 2021?
Reported as treating those notices as s.148A(b) show-cause notices instead of quashing them, with directions on how they were to proceed.
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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.
