The Gujarat High Court held that after the amendment by the Finance Act, 2020, the \u201cspecified date\u201d for furnishing the tax audit report under Expln. (ii) to s. 44AB is statutorily fixed as one month prior to the \u201cdue date\u201d for filing the return under s. 139(1). Therefore, once CBDT, by Circular No. 14 of 2025, extended the specified date from 30-09-2025 to 31-10-2025, it was incumbent upon it to correspondingly extend the due date for filing the return from 31-10-2025 to 30-11-2025. Merely extending the specified date without extending the due date would render Expln. (ii) to s. 44AB otiose and defeat the legislative intent behind the 2020 amendment, effectively restoring the pre-amendment position of simultaneous filing of audit report and return. Rejecting CBDT\u2019s stand that it would monitor the e-filing portal and decide later, the Court held that such an approach was contrary to the statutory scheme. Accordingly, the Court directed CBDT to issue a consequential circular under s. 119 extending the due date for filing returns up to 30-11-2025 for assessees required to furnish audit reports for FY 2024-25 relevant to AY 2025-26.(AY. 20025-26)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S. 139 : Return of income\u2014Tax audit report\u2014Specified date\u2014Extension of due date\u2014CBDT Circular No. 14 of 2025 extending only the \u201cspecified date\u201d without extending the \u201cdue date\u201d is contrary to Expln. (ii) to s. 44AB and legislative intent\u2014There must statutorily remain a gap of one month between the tax audit report date and return filing due date\u2014CBDT directed to extend due date for filing return to 30-11-2025 for assessees liable to furnish audit report for AY. 2025-26.[S. 44AB, 119, 139(1), 139(2), 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-59447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-income-tax-act"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-fsP","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59447","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=59447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59448,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59447\/revisions\/59448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}