Exchange data shows Rs 6.73 crore of receipts against the Rs 11.6 lakh I put in Schedule VDA, and there is now a s.148A show-cause. How do I answer it, and what do I have to concede?
The client is a salaried software engineer in Pune who traded crypto on the side through FY 2023-24, the year relevant to AY 2024-25. He used two Indian exchanges, on which the aggregate consideration reported through the exchanges' quarterly statements was Rs 4.62 crore and Rs 2.11 crore, with 1% deducted amounting to Rs 6.73 lakh, and one offshore platform, to which he remitted Rs 38 lakh through the year and on which the closing balance at 31 March 2024 was worth about Rs 21.4 lakh. Nothing from the offshore platform appears in the annual information statement and nothing was deducted on it. His return was filed on 26 July 2024 in a form that carries Schedule VDA, with 41 rows and a net figure of Rs 11.6 lakh, arrived at by setting Rs 17.8 lakh of losses on some coins against Rs 29.4 lakh of gains on others. Two coin-for-coin swaps in November 2023 and February 2024, of about Rs 9.2 lakh and Rs 6.4 lakh, were not entered at all. Schedule FA is blank. On 17 June 2025 he received a communication under the Board's nudge campaign on virtual digital assets and did nothing about it. A show-cause under s.148A followed on 4 May 2026, describing information that VDA receipts of Rs 6.73 crore stand against declared VDA income of Rs 11.6 lakh, with nothing annexed except that one-line description. He has full trade and deduction reports from both Indian exchanges, a partial export from the offshore platform, bank statements for the remittances, and no purchase record at all for two lots bought in FY 2022-23 and sold in the year under notice.
Before drafting, split the notice into the three different things it has run together. The gap between Rs 6.73 crore and Rs 11.6 lakh is mostly arithmetic - the department holds gross consideration on each disposal and the return reports gain - and it is answered with a ledger. The netting of losses against gains is not arithmetic; it is a real understatement, because the charging provision forbids exactly that set-off. And the offshore leg is neither: it is a disclosure problem that the reconciliation will not touch and that carries an exposure outside the Income-tax Act altogether. A reply that treats the whole notice as a turnover-against-gain reconciliation will win the first point, lose the second the moment the officer opens the schedule, and leave the third to surface later on worse terms.
The figure in the department's hands is consideration on each disposal, not income. The 1% is deducted on consideration at every transfer, so a trader who recycles the same money produces a reported total many times his gain, and a coin-for-coin swap appears as consideration although no rupees moved. The library sets out the machinery that generates the figure - the exchange's own quarterly statement of the transfers it intermediates, which also has to carry the transfers on which nothing was deducted - so the reply can name what the officer is holding rather than guess at it. The corpus also holds a High Court decision refusing to interfere with a reassessment notice where the assessee answered a crypto volume figure with his return, his computation and his bank statements and asserted that the figure was turnover: the Court treated the trade ledger as the document that could have verified the assertion and its absence as the reason the officer's brief order was enough. The lesson is that at the show-cause stage the reconciliation has to be produced, not promised.
The charge on VDA income is a flat 30% with surcharge and cess, and the same provision allows no deduction other than cost of acquisition and no set-off of any loss under any provision, and forbids carrying a VDA loss forward. The library reads that, with the transaction-level design of the schedule itself, as meaning each disposal stands on its own, so a loss on one coin cannot be set against a gain on another in the same year. On these figures the return should have offered Rs 29.4 lakh and not Rs 11.6 lakh, before the swaps are added. Say so in the reply and put the corrected computation in it. The general set-off and carry-forward scheme in the Act does not help here - it is displaced for this class of income by the overriding provision.
Cost of acquisition is the single deduction the charging provision leaves open, and an unproved cost is treated as nil - which on the two lots carried in from FY 2022-23 turns the whole consideration into income. Exchange fees, brokerage, advisory charges and hardware or power costs are all outside. There is one narrow opening the library holds: a Tribunal order for the first year of the regime accepting that interest on funds borrowed exclusively to buy the assets, up to the date of acquisition, forms part of cost of acquisition, on the footing that the sub-section bars every deduction other than cost of acquisition but does not define that expression. If any part of this client's buying was funded by a traced borrowing, put that alternative characterisation on record now.
A coin-for-coin exchange is a transfer of the coin given up, so it is taxable at its value on that date even though no money moved, and both swaps have to go into the recomputation. The withholding side is separate and is often missed. The Board's guidelines treat consideration in kind as within the section: outside an exchange each party to a swap is both buyer and seller, each must deduct on the transfer it makes, and the assets are to be exchanged only after each has shown the other proof of payment. A person without a tax deduction account number pays and reports through a single challan-cum-statement within thirty days from the end of the month of deduction, with the certificate fifteen days after that. If the client did his swaps off-exchange and deducted nothing, that is a default of his own and it needs pricing before the reply frames him as a compliant taxpayer with an arithmetic problem.
The 1% obligation is confined by its own words to payment to a resident, so an offshore platform acting as principal usually produces no deduction and no entry in the annual information statement. The charge is untouched by that: a resident and ordinarily resident is taxed on the gain wherever the platform sits, the schedule has to be filled transaction by transaction just the same, and advance tax has to be paid because no credit is coming. The exposure that matters more is on the reporting side. Whether a balance on an offshore exchange is a foreign asset for the foreign-asset schedule is unsettled - the schedule has no row for it - and the consequence of getting it wrong is not an income-tax addition but a flat penalty for each year of default under the separate foreign-assets legislation. A Special Bench of the Tribunal has held that penalty to be discretionary rather than automatic, which is the answer if it is ever levied, but the safer course is to review the holding against the schedule's categories and record the reasoning taken.
Information gathered in accordance with the Board's risk management strategy is the first item on the statutory list of what may found a reopening, so an attack arguing that portal or campaign data cannot be information at all will fail. What the classification is not is the material, and the underlying data has to be furnished. The library holds a High Court decision setting aside the order and the consequent notice where the material relied on was withheld, and another holding the department duty bound to supply all material information, the enquiry conducted and the supporting documents along with the show-cause. So ask by name for the reporting entity, the statement it filed, the transaction rows and the period, and ask for time measured from the date they are supplied. Prior approval of the specified authority is a separate condition, and the rank has moved with the 2024 substitution.
For this year the point does not arise: the ordinary window runs three years and three months from the end of the assessment year, so a May 2026 notice for AY 2024-25 is comfortably inside it and the department does not need the extended limb. It matters for what comes next. The same exchange data will support notices for FY 2022-23 and earlier, and there the extended window depends on the officer holding evidence of escaped income of Rs 50 lakh or more. Escaped income is the gain, not the gross consideration, and on this trading pattern the two differ by a factor of fifty. The library also records that no decision was traced requiring the order to set out that arithmetic, so the point has to be made by putting the computation in yourself rather than by demanding that the officer show his.
The corrected figure on these facts is at least Rs 29.4 lakh plus the two swaps, taxed at a flat 30% with surcharge and cess and with the 1% already deducted available as credit. Against that, an updated return is available for up to forty-eight months from the end of the assessment year with additional tax on a rising scale, and it closes the year rather than leaving it to a reassessment that will also carry interest for the advance tax shortfall and a penalty exposure of 50% of the tax on an under-reporting finding, or 200% if the officer records misreporting. The immunity route exists but is only for under-reporting, and it requires paying the tax and interest and not appealing. The choice has to be made before the reply goes in, because the reply will fix the client's account of what happened.
Where the ledger is produced at the show-cause stage the arithmetic part of the gap closes almost entirely, and the officer is left with the netting and the swaps. Those are conceded, because there is no answer to them on the statute, and the year is either corrected by an updated return or reassessed on a figure close to the corrected computation. What decides the size of the file is the offshore leg: if it is disclosed and taxed with a cost record behind it, this is a Rs 30 lakh dispute; if it is contested and the cost cannot be proved, the officer will take the gross remittance-funded position and the reporting exposure under the separate foreign-assets legislation opens alongside. The other thing the outcome turns on is timing - the client who corrects before the reassessment notice is in a different conversation from the one who is still explaining after it.