The Evidence Was Dated After the Year It Taxed

In January 2021 a search team left a property broker’s premises carrying an agreement to sell a plot in Noida. It was dated 25 November 2019. It recorded a price of ₹4.50 crore.

Neither the seller nor the buyer had signed it.

More than five years later, on 28 September 2026, ITAT Mumbai deleted every rupee that had been built on it. Smt. Jaya Amitabh Bachchan v. DCIT, ITA No. 283/Mum/2026 and IT(SS)A No. 284/Mum/2026, ‘F’ Bench. Both appeals allowed. ₹11 lakh for AY 2019-20 and ₹3.83 crore for AY 2020-21, gone.

The name will carry this order further than most. The reasoning deserves the distance more, because it is about the ordinary machinery of a search assessment — what somebody else’s statement and somebody else’s phone can actually prove, and when.

Three elements, and one of them is the year

Section 69A applies where an assessee is found to be the owner of money in a financial year, and the nature and source of it go unexplained.

Read it slowly, because assessment orders routinely stop at the second element. The section needs an amount, a recipient, and a previous year. Material that makes a transaction look probable, without fixing all three, has not finished the job.

What the department had

A respectable-looking pile, at first glance.

The unsigned agreement. A broker’s statement describing cash carried from Delhi to Mumbai through angadias. And WhatsApp messages pulled from the phone of the proposed buyer’s husband — one of which, the Assessing Officer read, set out ₹3.83 crore in cash and ₹11 lakh by cheque.

₹11 lakh was assessed in AY 2019-20. ₹3.83 crore in AY 2020-21. The CIT(A) dismissed both appeals in December 2025.

Then someone checked the dates

The previous year relevant to AY 2020-21 ended on 31 March 2020.

The two messages carrying the ₹3.83 crore figure are dated 28 October 2020 and 2 December 2020.

Both of them land in the *following* previous year. They may say something about what the parties discussed afterwards. They cannot say when cash changed hands, and without that they do not reach into the year under appeal at all.

One message does sit inside the year — 10 December 2019, referring to ₹3.50 crore going to Mumbai. It arrives after the 30 November deadline the agreement itself set for the balance, and its author called the figure an estimate.

Nowhere does the assessment order name a date on which cash was delivered during FY 2019-20. Or the angadias who carried it. Or the instalments it came in.

Evidence that a sum was discussed later is not evidence that it was received then.

No two figures met

The inconsistency ran through the consideration itself.

The agreement recited ₹1 crore paid by cheque. The only bank credit anyone could find was ₹11 lakh.

So: a document no party signed, reciting a payment the bank contradicts, for a price the broker disputes, producing an assessment that matches neither. Relevant material, certainly. Proof of the amounts assessed, no.

The ₹11 lakh was never unexplained at all

This limb is the one most likely to repeat elsewhere, and it is the simpler error.

The Assessing Officer’s own enquiry had already established the credit — cheque no. 0267, drawn on the proposed buyer’s proprietary concern, credited 27 February 2019. Payer known. Banking channel known. Character as an advance accepted by the buyer herself.

There was nothing left to explain.

Money received as an advance and retained during negotiations for the transfer of a capital asset is dealt with by section 51, against the cost of acquisition, in the year of transfer. It is not unexplained money in the year it arrives. The Tribunal would not even let the argument about whether the advance was later returned decide whether the original credit was unexplained — a different question, in a different year.

This is not a whitewash

Worth saying clearly, because orders like this are often read as though the Tribunal simply preferred the assessee. It did not.

It records that the buyer and her husband were offered cross-examination of the broker and did not attend, and says plainly that this weighs against their denials. It records that the author of the 28 October 2020 message admitted writing it and had no explanation for it, and calls that an adverse circumstance, weighed. It refuses to treat the later registered sale of the plot to a different purchaser in April 2023 as proof that no money could have passed earlier — a deal can collapse after a payment.

All of that went into the scale. The conclusion still holds, and it is narrow: non-attendance does not establish the amount, the recipient, or the year.

Because the appeals succeeded on merits, the challenges to the notices under sections 143(2) and 153C were left open, untouched.

If you are holding one of these

An addition built on somebody else’s statement or somebody else’s phone is answered by the same five questions every time. They sit under the broader question of what actually decides an unexplained credit appeal.

• Date every document against the year assessed. Material generated after the year closed may show a conversation. It does not show a receipt inside the year.
• Make the order identify the receipt. Dates, instalments, carriers, route. An assessment that cannot say when the money arrived has not found your client to be its owner in that year.
• Line the figures up side by side. Where the document, the statement and the assessment each carry a different number, that gap is the argument.
• Separate what is explained from what is not. A credit the officer has himself traced to a named payer through the banking channel is not unexplained money, whatever is alleged about the transaction around it.
• Take the cross-examination when it is offered. It cut against the deniers here. It would have cut the other way just as easily.

The department is entitled to look behind the form of a transaction, and Sumati Dayal is the authority that lets it, and Durga Prasad More sets the starting point it works from. This order marks the far edge of that permission: an inference drawn from proved circumstances is one thing. An addition that cannot fix the year is another.