Tecumseh Products lndia Private Limited Vs DCIT (Telangana High Court)
The Telangana High Court heard a writ petition challenging notices issued under Sections 148A and 148 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, and consequential assessment orders passed under Section 147. The petition was taken up on a limited but decisive ground: that the impugned notices and proceedings were initiated by the jurisdictional Assessing Officer instead of being conducted in a faceless manner, as required after amendments introduced by the Finance Act, 2021 with effect from 01.04.2021.
The petitioner contended that this issue was already conclusively decided by the Telangana High Court in Kankanala Ravindra Reddy v. Income Tax Officer (decided on 14.09.2023), where a batch of writ petitions had been allowed on the ground that notices under Sections 148A and 148 issued otherwise than through the faceless mechanism were invalid. That judgment held such proceedings to be contrary to Section 151A of the Act read with Notification No.18/2022 dated 29.03.2022. The Court noted that the said decision had since been consistently followed in numerous writ petitions by the same High Court.
The Court further observed that several other High Courts—including the Bombay, Gauhati, Punjab & Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, and Calcutta High Courts—had also decided the same issue against the Revenue, holding that reassessment notices issued by jurisdictional officers instead of through the faceless mechanism were unsustainable in law. Despite this consistent judicial position, the Court recorded that the Income Tax Department continued to issue similar notices, leading to a daily influx of identical writ petitions.
