Before 4-5 years people used to receive notices from Income Tax Department via and post and from past 4-5 years this working has been digitalised and now people receive notices online over email and the notices were generated via a system known as Income Tax Business Application because of which Income Tax Department could keep a proper trail of notices sent by officer and response received from assessee. However still there were instances where officers used to issue manual notices because of one or other reasons and because of which it was difficult to keep an audit trail.
To prevent such instances CBDT has made amendment to Section 119 Of the Income Tax Act and said that no communication would be sent to assessee after 1st October 2019 without generating a Document identification number (DIN) and quoting the same on the document. Any document without a DIN number would be considered as invalid and shall be deemed to have never been issued.
In the Notification CBDT has mentioned few exceptional circumstances where an officer may issue manual notices but in that case also he/she will have to state the reason for such manual notice in the notice itself and will also have to take written permission of Chief Commissioner/ Director General of Income Tax and in some situation will have to update DIN number on the document within 15 working days of the issuance of notice.
All the notices issued after this notification needs to be assigned DIN number before 31st October 2019.
You can read the full notification here:
//www.incometaxindia.gov.in/communications/circular/circular_19_2019.pdf
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