Six Days Is Not Seven

Most grounds of appeal are arguments. This one is arithmetic.

On 22 September 2026, in Kaizen Motoventures Private Limited v. ACIT, ITA 409/RPR/2026, a Division Bench of ITAT Raipur held that a show-cause notice under section 148A(b) which gave the assessee less than seven clear days to reply was invalid and void ab initio, and quashed the assessment order built on it. The notice was dated 3 March 2023; the assessment year was 2019-20.

Nothing about the merits was reached. Nothing needed to be.

What the section actually requires

Before issuing a notice under section 148, the Assessing Officer has to give the assessee an opportunity of being heard, by serving a show-cause notice specifying a time not less than seven days and not exceeding thirty days, running from the date the notice is issued — or such longer time as the officer allows on an application.

Read that as a floor and a ceiling with nothing in between for discretion. The officer may give eight days, or twenty, or thirty. Six is not a shorter version of seven. It is outside the power.

Seven *clear* days

This is where notices go wrong while looking compliant.

Clear days exclude both ends: the day the period starts and the day fixed for compliance. Seven clear days between a notice and a deadline puts the deadline on the eighth day, not the seventh. Count inclusively — the way most people count a week — and the notice is a day short while appearing on its face to give exactly what the section demands.

That single day is what the Raipur order turned on.

Why it is fatal rather than irregular

The obvious objection is that this is a technicality: the assessee could have replied anyway, or was heard later, or suffered nothing.

It does not hold, and the reason is worth being precise about. The seven days are not a step in the exercise of the power to reopen. They are a condition of the power itself — the section permits the officer to proceed only after giving that opportunity. A notice that does not give it has not engaged the section, so there is no valid notice, no valid order under section 148A(d), and nothing on which a section 148 notice can stand.

Which is why the Tribunal used the words it did: void ab initio, not irregular. An irregularity can be cured by a later opportunity. A jurisdictional defect cannot be cured by anything, because the authority never arose.

Check which version applies to *your* notice

This is the part that will catch people out over the next two years, and it is easy to get wrong.

The reassessment machinery has moved twice. Section 148A was inserted by the Finance Act 2021 and applied to notices from 1 April 2021. It was then substituted with effect from 1 September 2024. And the Income-tax Act, 1961 now gives way to the Income-tax Act, 2025, in which section 148A corresponds to section 281.

So before running this ground, fix the date of *your* notice and read the provision as it stood on that date. The seven-day floor is a feature of the section in the form applicable to the 2023 notice in Kaizen. Do not carry the number across a version boundary on trust — check the text that governed the notice in your hands.

What to do with an assessment order in front of you

Ten minutes, and the ground is either there or it is not.

• Find the 148A(b) notice and read three dates: the date of issue, the date of service, and the date fixed for the reply.
• Count clear days, excluding both the start and the compliance date. If the gap is seven days rather than eight, the notice is short.
• Check the file for an extension. The section allows a longer time on the assessee’s application — and an extension granted on request is not the same as a short notice.
• Take the point at the earliest stage. It is a jurisdictional objection and does not depend on the merits, but a ground raised late invites an argument about whether it was raised at all.
• Do not stop there. The same file often carries the section 151 sanction and the faceless-allocation questions under section 151A. A notice short on time is rarely the only thing wrong with it.

The wider question of what the Tribunal weighs once an addition is reached on merits is taken up in what decides an unexplained credit appeal, and the question of which head an addition belongs under in section 68 or section 69A.

This note is general information drawn from a reported decision and the statute, not advice on your matter. The order above was decided on its own record, and the provision applicable to a notice depends on its date.