The Hyderabad Bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) has deleted the penalty levied under Section 271DA of the Income Tax Act, 1961, ruling that the Revenue cannot reject an assessee’s books of accounts under Section 145(3) as unreliable to estimate business profits and simultaneously rely on uncorroborated entries in those exact same books to impose a 100% penalty for cash receipt violations under Section 269ST . Furthermore, the Tribunal reiterated that recording a clear, conscious, and discernible satisfaction in the assessment order is an indispensable jurisdictional prerequisite for initiating such quasi-criminal penalty proceedings, an omission that renders the action void ab initio . The dispute originally arose from a search and seizure operation under Section 132 conducted on the Vasavi Group, which uncovered parallel electronic Tally data detailing unaccounted cash receipts . The ITAT emphasized that a voluntary disclosure or admission of additional income to buy peace and avoid prolonged litigation does not equate to a confession of technical cash-handling violations, and the primary burden of proof remains entirely on the Revenue to independently establish person-wise, date-wise, and transaction-wise defaults with cogent material . The Tribunal also highlighted that enforcing a 100% penalty on gross receipts is highly disproportionate when the Assessing Officer himself estimated the actual business profit at only 16%, creating a stark operational asymmetry that is astronomically high and directly opposed to the Wednesbury principle of reasonableness . Finding no valid or clear jurisdictional foundation for the penalty framework, the Tribunal set aside the lower orders and completely deleted the penalties.