Section 149 of the Income Tax Act

Completed assessments can be interfered with under Section 153A or 153C only on the basis of incriminating material unearthed during the search, necessitating a direct correlation between the discovered material and the power to assess or reopen concluded assessments.

The legal fiction created by the Ashish Agarwal judgment stops the limitation clock for Section 148 notices from the date of the deemed notice. Orders issued without proper jurisdiction, or those inconsistent with statutory prescriptions, are a nullity, and there can be no waiver of such fundamental jurisdictional requirements.

Notices issued under the unamended Section 148 of the Income-tax Act between April 1, 2021, and May 4, 2022, must be treated as notices issued under the new Section 148A(b) of the amended law. This requires the Assessing Officer to follow the procedure prescribed under the amended reassessment provisions, including issuing an order under Section 148A(d) before a fresh notice under Section 148.

For a non-searched person under Section 153C, the relevant six assessment years are counted backward from the assessment year in which the search was conducted, as prescribed by the first proviso to Section 153C(1).

For initiating proceedings under Section 153C, seized documents must be incriminating and specifically relate to the assessment years for which assessments are reopened. A document relevant only for one year cannot be used to reopen other assessment years without being incriminating for those years.

A difference between returned and assessed income creates an inference of concealment, activating the presumption under Explanation 1 to Section 271(1)(c). The onus is on the assessee to rebut this presumption by providing a plausible explanation; failure to do so attracts penalty.

For initiating assessment under Section 153C (prior to its amendment on June 1, 2015) against an 'other person', the essential jurisdictional requirement is that the seized documents forming the basis of the satisfaction note must belong to that 'other person', rather than merely pertaining to them.

For assessments under Section 153C, the commencement point for calculating the six or ten assessment year block period is the date of issuing the Section 153C notice, or the date of the satisfaction note/handing over of books, as clarified by the first proviso to Section 153C(1).

An amendment made by way of substitution relates back to the date of the Parent Act, effectively replacing the earlier provision as if it never existed. This principle applies to the retrospective amendment of Section 153C of the Income Tax Act, 1961, from 'belongs or belong to' to 'pertains or pertain to', which was intended to remedy a mischief.