Allowing the petition the court held that the reasons recorded by the ITO and the explanation given by the Department with regard to the provisional attachment were not acceptable as the provision was to be used only in rare situations where the bona fides of the assessee were in question or there had been a clear case of evasion of tax. The taxability of the amount in question was a debatable issue. The ITO had himself changed the goal post by first charging the amount under section\u00a028(iv)\u00a0and thereafter, under section\u00a028(ii)(a)\u00a0. In a situation wherein the ITO was himself not certain of the taxability, the use of a drastic provision such as section\u00a0281B\u00a0was not tenable. Moreover, no reasons had been provided in the attachment notice. The submission of the Department that the amount of tax being large, the provisional attachment was resorted to, was not a good enough reason. If such reason was accepted then in all cases of high demands, provisional attachment would become the norm. The attachment order was quashed and set aside. However writ against assessment order was not entertained as the assessee has the alternative remedy of filing an appeal before CIT (A) ( AY. 2017-18)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S. 281B : Provisional attachment -Debatable issue – Quantum of tax being high cannot be ground for attachment \u2014 Order unsustainable [ S.28 (ii)(a),28(iv), 246A, Art , 226 ] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-income-tax-act"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-4vq","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17325,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17324\/revisions\/17325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}