Section 269M — Powers of Competent Authority

CHAPTER XX-A — ACQUISITION OF IMMOVABLE PROPERTIES IN CERTAIN CASES OF TRANSFER TO COUNTERACT EVASION OF TAX

Section 269M — Powers of competent authority

Case Laws & Commentary — Income-tax Act, 1961 (as amended by the Finance Act, 2026) — bharattax.co Treatise

Status: Historic / spent. Chapter XX-A was inserted by the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act, 1972, with effect from 15 November 1972, and does not apply to transfers of immovable property made after 30 September 1986 (section 269RR). It stands superseded by Chapter XX-C and, for current transactions, by section 50C / section 56(2)(x).

Finance Act, 2026: No amendment. The Finance Act, 2026 does not touch any provision of Chapter XX-A.

Mechanism: Clothes the competent authority with the powers of a civil court / a Principal Commissioner or Commissioner under section 131 (discovery, inspection, enforcing attendance, compelling production of evidence) for the purposes of the Chapter.

Litigation profile: Powers-conferring provision; no independent merits litigation.

A. COMMENTARY

Adjudicatory powers

Section 269M equips the competent authority with the section 131 powers — discovery and inspection, enforcing attendance, compelling production of books and documents, and issuing commissions — so that it can properly find facts (especially on understatement and value) at the section 269F stage. The powers exist to make the hearing meaningful, which dovetails with the natural-justice requirement of C.B. Gautam.

Candour

No reported decision turns on section 269M in isolation; it is enabling machinery.

B. STATUTORY TEXT (verbatim)

Reproduced verbatim from the Income-tax Act, 1961, as amended up to the Finance Act, 2025 (the Finance Act, 2026 makes no change). Page-header/footer artefacts of the source PDF have been removed; wording, clause-lettering and punctuation are unaltered.

Powers of competent authority.

269M. The competent authority shall have, for the purposes of this Chapter, all the powers that a Principal Commissioner or Commissioner has, for the purposes of this Act, under section 131.

C. AUTHORITIES

Candour rule: an enabling powers provision; the cognate authority links the powers to a fair, fact-based hearing.

Cognate — powers in aid of a fair, reasoned adjudication

C.B. Gautam v. Union of India — [1993] 199 ITR 530 (SC)

Cognate Decided on Chapter XX-C (section 269UD pre-emptive purchase), the successor scheme. The Supreme Court held that pre-emptive purchase / acquisition for undervaluation can be resorted to only where there is 'significant undervaluation' (of the order of 15%), which raises a rebuttable presumption of an attempt to evade tax, and that the principles of natural justice — a reasonable opportunity of hearing — must be read into the provision before an order divesting a citizen of property is made, even where the statute is silent.

Relevance The Court expressly traced the lineage of the pre-emptive-purchase scheme to Chapter XX-A; its reasoning on undervaluation-as-rebuttable-presumption and on natural justice is directly transposable to sections 269C and 269F.