The Tax Publishers

Are Section 142(1) and Section 148 Mutually Exclusive?

CA. V.K. Subramani

The learned author examines the consequences of and interplay between Sections 142(1), 144 and 148. He deals with a very recent Vishakhapatnam Bench of ITAT decision in which there was no response to a notice under Section 142(1) and the assessing officer did not resort to Section 144 but instead, sent a notice under Section 148, to which the assessee responded by filing a return. The assessing officer thereupon issued a Section 143(2) notice and completed assessment under Section 143(3). The issue in this case is of justifiability of this notice of the assessing officer. The going through with an analytical study of all the issues by learned author is a pleasant exercise.

Filing of income-tax return is a compliance ritual to be made on annual basis. The responsibility of the taxpayer stops with filing of return of income/loss. A conscious effort is given and decision is made for disclosing the income and as suggested by our Honble Finance Minister Arun Jaitley the mind set to pay correct amount of tax is largely absent in India. It is in this background, the taxpayers comply with the legal provisions and no tax payer, except a few, can say that he has admitted 100% of the income for income-tax purposes.

When the taxpayer completes his responsibility of filing the return with income or loss, the work of the Assessing Officer would commence. Such work is subject to various guidelines prescribed by the CBDT and the return filed by the taxpayer is accordingly verified.

A recent Tribunal decision in the case of Medapati Venkayamma v. ITO 2017 TaxPub(DT) 4123 (Visakha-Trib) : (2017) 160 DTR (Visakha)(Trib) 58 is discussed in this write-up.

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