A partnership firm dealing in industrial fasteners filed its return for AY 2019-20 on 30 September 2019. A s.148 notice issued in April 2023 and the firm wrote on 12 May 2023 asking that the return already filed be treated as the return in response to the notice. The Assessing Officer then issued three questionnaires under s.142(1), the firm replied to each with confirmations and bank statements, and an order under s.147 read with s.144B was passed on 20 March 2025 adding Rs 1,15,00,000 as unexplained cash credits in respect of unsecured loans from four parties. The opening paragraph of the order lists the s.148 notice and the three s.142(1) notices and nothing else. Nothing on the portal, and nothing produced with the order, shows that a notice under s.143(2) was ever generated. The firm did not object on this ground while the assessment was pending. An appeal has been filed before the CIT(A) and the grounds can still be amended.
Before arguing a rupee of the addition, apply for inspection of the assessment record and establish from the Department's own documents whether a s.143(2) notice was ever generated for this reassessment. The question is not whether the firm received one; it is whether one ever emanated from the Department. If none exists, the assessment was framed without the step that gives the officer jurisdiction to go behind the return, and the four loan creditors never have to be proved.
The distinction that decides these cases is between a notice that exists but reached the assessee imperfectly and a notice that never emanated from the Department at all. The point is won on the Department's own documents, so it has to be pleaded as non-issue or out-of-time issue and supported from the record, not framed as a complaint that the assessee did not receive anything. Pleading it vaguely is how the ground is lost. The library now holds an entry setting the route out - plead non-issue, apply for inspection of the assessment record, and ask on the record for the notice and its generation and despatch details to be produced - and it says plainly that no authority was found for the proposition that a portal or system extract by itself proves that no notice was ever generated.
The Supreme Court has held that where the officer repudiates the return and proceeds to enquire he must follow the enquiry provision and the scrutiny notice, and that issue of that notice within the prescribed period is mandatory. It has separately held that the complete absence of the notice renders the assessment void and that the participation of the assessee does not supply it. A jurisdictional defect is not curable and not waivable; a procedural one is, which is why the framing matters.
The deeming provision operates where a notice was in fact issued and reached the assessee imperfectly, and its proviso preserves an objection taken before the assessment was completed. Where no notice was ever generated there is nothing to deem served, so the provision has no subject matter. A High Court has dismissed the Revenue's appeal on exactly that footing, holding failure to issue the notice a fatal defect that the provision cannot remedy.
A High Court has held that the officer's failure to issue the scrutiny notice after the assessee indicated that its original return be treated as the return filed in response to the reassessment notice is fatal to the reassessment order, and that the deeming provision does not assist the Revenue in that situation. The Tribunal has applied the same reasoning to quash a reassessment and delete the cash credit addition, rejecting the argument that participation cured the omission. This is the closest fact pattern to the firm's own.
The section requires the notice to issue within the period it prescribes, counted from the end of the financial year in which the return is furnished; the library now records that period as three months, reduced from six with effect from April 2021, so the outer date is a one-line computation from the date of the return. A notice issued after that outer date is not saved either, because the vice lies in the timing of the assumption of jurisdiction rather than in service. Test the produced document against the despatch record rather than the date typed on it, since the date of issue in an electronic system is the date of transmission, not of generation or signing.
The point is a pure question of law that can be taken for the first time before the Tribunal, provided it is pleaded as non-issue and can be supported from the record. The appeal ladder has its own clocks, sixty days to the Tribunal from communication of the first appellate order and a substantial question of law requirement above that, so the ground has to be carried up rather than reconstructed later.
The initial burden under the cash credits provision is on the assessee to establish the identity of the creditor, his creditworthiness and the genuineness of the transaction, and only once all three are established does the burden shift. If the jurisdictional ground fails, an appeal that has led only on procedure and never engaged the creditors is in a weak position on remand, and the sum is taxed at the flat unexplained-credit rate rather than at slab rates.
Where the record genuinely shows no notice, the ground succeeds more often at the Tribunal than before the CIT(A), because first appellate authorities tend to look for a way to remand and the Tribunal is the last fact-finding rung. A common intermediate outcome is that the Department locates a notice in the system that was never served, which converts the case from non-issue to timing and disclosure. Some benches instead set the assessment aside for fresh adjudication, which gives the officer a second chance, so the ground is not a guaranteed annulment.