Kotha Kanthaiah Vs Office of the Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax (Telangana High Court)
The Telangana High Court heard the writ petition challenging the notices issued under Sections 148A and 148 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, as well as the assessment orders passed under Section 147. The petitioner contended that the notices and subsequent proceedings were invalid because, after the amendments introduced by the Finance Act, 2021, notices under Sections 148A and 148 were required to be issued in a faceless manner. It was argued that these requirements had been violated by the jurisdictional Assessing Officer. The petitioner relied on the earlier decision of the Telangana High Court in Kanakala Ravindra Reddy, delivered on 14.09.2023, wherein similar notices were held invalid for violating Section 151A read with Notification 18/2022. That decision had been consistently followed in multiple writ petitions.
The Court noted that the same issue had been decided against the Revenue by several High Courts, including Bombay, Gauhati, Punjab and Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, and Calcutta High Courts, in matters involving identical questions regarding the non-faceless issuance of notices under Sections 148A and 148. Despite this, a large number of identical writ petitions continued to be filed daily. The Revenue argued that decisions such as Hexaware Technologies and Kanakala Ravindra Reddy were under challenge before the Supreme Court in SLP No. 3574 of 2024 and that approximately 1200 SLPs on the same issue were pending. However, the Revenue acknowledged that no interim order had been granted by the Supreme Court in any of these cases.
