Held, that once the order under section 148A(d) was quashed by the High Court, the Assessing Officer was required to consider the assessee’s reply to the notice under section 148A(b) and issue a fresh order under section 148A(d). After such order was passed, a fresh notice under section 148 should have been issued. This was not done. Moreover the reply of the assessee on all aspects was completely disregarded by the Assessing Officer. The virtual hearing was an empty formality and no questions were put to the assessee when the assessee made submissions. Hence, the order under section 148A(d) of the Act issued without providing a reasonable opportunity to the assessee was not valid.<\/p>\n
Obter dicta:(<\/strong>para 10).\u201d<\/strong> The purpose of personal hearing whether physical or virtual is to enable the assessee to make submissions, provide clarifications and respond to questions, if posed. This can only be achieved if such hearing is interactive. Faceless assessments were introduced so as to avoid the deleterious consequences of direct interaction. Even making an allowance therefor, an appropriate mechanism should be evolved by the Income-tax Department to ensure that such hearings are conducted in a meaningful manner.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" S. 148A: Reassessment-Conducting inquiry, providing opportunity before issue of notice-Natural justice-Opportunity of hearing was not given-Strictures-Obiter dicta-Matter remanded.[S. 147, 148, 148A(b) 148A(d), 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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-income-tax-act"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9S2Rw-fEn","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60163","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=60163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60164,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60163\/revisions\/60164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itatonline.org\/digest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}