Ritika Singh Sisodiya/TNNLucknow: The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad HC has held that an income tax reassessment notice issued in the name of a deceased person is void ab initio and cannot be validated later by substituting the legal heir or treating it as a procedural defect.Quashing the reassessment proceedings and the consequential tax demand, the court urged Parliament to consider amending the law to address the legislative gap exposed by such cases. It directed that a copy of the judgment be forwarded to the Union ministry of finance.The order was passed by a division bench of justices Shekhar B Saraf and Abdesh Kumar Chaudhary while allowing a writ petition filed by Asha Dubey.According to the petition, Asha’s husband,Sanjay Dubey died in Jan 2024. Despite his death, the I-T department issued a notice under Section 148 of the I-T Act in Mar 2025, alleging undisclosed cash transactions of Rs 27.44 lakh detected during a search on the Omaxe Group. The department claimed the amount represented cash paid by the deceased towards the purchase of a flat. It subsequently proceeded against his widow as the legal heir and raised a tax demand of about Rs 39.67 lakh.A notice issued in the name of a dead person suffers from an inherent jurisdictional defect that cannot be cured under Section 292B of the Act. It further clarified that proceedings against a legal representative under Section 159 are permissible only if valid proceedings had been initiated during the lifetime of the assessee.T
